Happy birthday, Mary McCarthy

It is the birthday of writer Mary McCarthy (1912), who is remembered for her best-selling novel The Group (1963), which deals with the lives of eight women after they graduated from Vassar College during the Depression. It examines the women's views on socialism, psychoanalysis, love, and sex. She is also remembered for her long-running feud with writer Lillian Hellman, both of whom held extreme leftist political views. McCarthy once quipped to interviewer Dick Cavett about Hellman: " … every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

Mary McCarthy wrote The Group

Mary McCarthy

It is the birthday of writer Mary McCarthy (1912), who is most remembered for her popular novel The Group (1963), which examines the post-college lives of eight women who graduated together from Vassar College during the Great Depression. It deals with the women's views on sex, love, psychoanalysis and socialism. The book remained on The New York Times best-seller list for two years.

McCarthy, who was never as well known as her actor brother Kevin McCarthy, was a Communist sympathizer in the 1930s, a Trotskyite, and a vocal opponent of Stalinism. Later, she vigorously opposed the Vietnam war and wrote articles supporting the Vietcong. She contributed to The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, and The New Republic.

She served as an editor of The Partisan Review, a literary journal she helped revive in 1937 with its founder, Philip Rahv, with whom she had an affair.

She famously feuded with writer Lillian Hellman, who was also a left-wing writer. Some scholars attribute the feud to differences in degrees of liberalism or professional jealousy. Others say Hellman once tried to seduce McCarthy's lover, Philip Rahv.

In any case, on PBS in 1979, McCarthy told interviewer Dick Cavett that "… every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " Hellman didn't think the comment was that funny. She sued McCarthy for $2.25 million. The lawsuit never came to trial, though. Hellman died and her executors dropped the case. McCarthy had prepared by fact-checking Hellman's work and finding many errors. She was disappointed not to have her day in court. "I didn't want her to die," said McCarthy. "I wanted her to lose in court. I wanted her around for that."

Writer Nora Ephron wrote a musical, Imaginary Friends (2002), in which she creates a fictional conversation between McCarthy and Hellman. It examines how similar they were and tries to imagine why they hated each other.

Lillian Hellman wrote The Children's Hour

Lillian Hellman

It is the birthday of playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman (1905), whose "tough broad" lifestyle may have made her as memorable as her work. She drank, she smoked, she cursed, she fought and she loved in the grand style of contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.

She carried on a long-term love affair with detective writer Dashiell Hammett, who encouraged her to write her first play. The Children's Hour (1934) explored abuse of power, and it ran on Broadway for more than two years. It concerned two women who run a girls' boarding school and are accused falsely by an angry student of carrying on a lesbian affair.

She publicly supported the Spanish leftists against the Franco forces, she was briefly and nominally a member of the Communist Party, but mainly she was fiercely independent, saying it was clear to her she was not suited for any political party. In the 1950s, she was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities but refused to name names, instead testifying only about herself.

Her best-known play may be The Little Foxes (1939), about siblings struggling for the control of the family business. It is considered a scathing critique of capitalism. It starred Tallulah Bankhead in the premiere performance, and ran for more than four years on Broadway. It has been revived many times and was adapted for film by Hellman in 1941, The film starring Bette Davis was nominated for nine Oscars.

Her play Watch on the Rhine (1941) deals with a family's struggle against the rise of Fascism in Germany before World War II. It, too, was made into a film, also starring Bette Davis. Dashiell Hammett wrote the screenplay.

Hellman's The Lark (1955) is an English adaptation of a French play about Joan of Arc. Her Toys in the Attic (1960) is a family drama set in her native New Orleans. She had no involvement in the film of the same name, which flopped.

She won the National Book Award for her memoir, An Unfinished Woman (1969). Part of her second memoir, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973), was the basis of the Oscar-winning film Julia (1977), starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. Her third memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976), dealt with her experience in testifying before Congress during the McCarthy era. Her short novel, Maybe: A Story (1980), was published as fiction but includes the author, Hammett and other real people. Some critics suggested that it was another installment of her memoirs.

Hellman died in 1984 at her home in Martha's Vineyard. She was 79 years old.