![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 2 As the eminent critic and former Marxist Granville Hicks noted, McCarthy's fellow "highbrows almost unanimously disapproved of the novel." 3 This was a bit of an understatement. None were more scandalized by this than her New York intellectual confreres, who regarded her as a respectable, albeit still relatively minor literary figure with unabashedly "highbrow" tastes and a "Puritan" cast of mind. "What no one anticipated," writes McCarthy's biographer Carol Brightman, "was the speed with which The Group would make it to the nation's bedside tables, not just the tables of people who read Goodbye, Columbus and Herzog but their mothers', uncles', sisters', doctors', and neighbors'." 1 The novel made McCarthy a household name overnight. The runaway success of Mary McCarthy's The Group, a novel about the lives of eight Vassar graduates during the 1930s, was one of the most sensational literary events of 1963. ![]()
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