Historically famous critics

Mary McCarthy

1912-1989 · American · 20th century

Novelist and critic whose satire skewered liberal intellectuals and their pieties

McCarthy earned her place among the great American critics through a prose style so precise and merciless that colleagues feared her reviews. She turned her satire on fellow-traveling intellectuals, complacent academics, and the pieties of her own liberal circle, while her reporting from Vietnam attacked the euphemisms that made the war respectable. By refusing to spare her allies, she set a standard for intellectual honesty that still shapes serious criticism.