A bolt from the blue and other essays
By: Mary McCarthy ; edited and with an introduction by A.O. Scott.
Contributors: Scott, A. O.
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 389
Description: "Mary McCarthy may be best remembered today for her novels and memoirs, but she was also a dazzling and prolific essayist and critic, known for her witty and fearless commentary on topics ranging from American realist playwrights to women's fashion magazines, from left-wing politics to the nineteenth-century novel." "This collection, which spans her career from the 1930s to the 1970s, displays McCarthy's acute judgment and stylistic brio. It begins with a generous selection of her drama reviews, and includes essays on Nabokov, Burroughs, Salinger, Flaubert, Calvino, Sarraute, and Tolstoy. In the essays that follow, she dissects the social and political controversies that dominated midcentury American intellectual life, from the Moscow trials to the Vietnam War and the Watergate hearings."--BOOK JACKET.
Table of contents: title: Introduction to theater chronicles; title: Class angles and a Wilder classic; title: Shaw and Chekhov; title: Eugene O'Neill: dry ice; title: A streetcar called success; title: A new word; title: The American realist playwrights; title: Elizabethan revivals; title: A bolt from the blue; title: Burroughs's Naked lunch; title: J.D. Salinger's closed circuit; title: On Madame Bovary; title: Hanging by a thread; title: On rereading a favorite book; title: Acts of love; title: The fact in fiction; title: Ideas and the novel: lecture I; title: America the beautiful: the humanist in the bathtub; title: Mlle. Gulliver en amérique; title: My confession; title: Up the ladder from Charm to Vogue; title: Letter from Portugal; title: The home program; title: Philip Rahv (1908-1973); title: F.W. Dupee (1904-1979); title: The very unforgettable Miss Brayton; title: Notes of a resident of the Watergate; title: The moral certainties of John D. Ehrlichman.