Through the generosity of the late Professor Benedict Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, the Thammasat University Library has newly acquired some important books of interest for students of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) studies, political science, sociology, and related fields.
They are part of a special bequest of over 2800 books from the personal scholarly library of Professor Benedict Anderson at Cornell University, in addition to the previous donation of books from the library of Professor Anderson at his home in Bangkok. These newly available items will be on the TU Library shelves for the benefit of our students and ajarns. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.
Among them are two newly acquired books that should be useful to TU students who are interested in literature, gender studies, American history, sociology, and related subjects.
Birds of America and The Group are novels published by the American author Mary McCarthy.
The TU Library collection includes other books by and about Mary McCarthy.
Mary McCarthy was a noted Catholic intellectual and friend of the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
Birds of America (1971) is about Peter Levi, a student who specializes in ornithology, a branch of zoology dealing with the study of birds.
The title of the novel refers humorously to The Birds of America, a book by the naturalist and painter John James Audubon, containing illustrations of a wide variety of birds of the United States.
Peter Levi is a bird-watcher, but also an observer of older people and society.
At university, Peter attempts to become an activist, but his parents refuse to allow him to go to Mississippi to protest against racial prejudice against black people with a Students for Civil Rights group.
Instead, he goes on a junior year abroad to Paris, where he becomes politically involved with the nationwide student protests in France in 1968.
He has the most fun with a French bird-watching group.
McCarthy’s earlier novel The Group (1963) is about the lives of eight female friends after their graduation in 1933 from Vassar College.
Each character struggles with different issues, including gender discrimination in the work place, child-raising, financial difficulties, family crises, and personal relationships.
Nearly all the women’s issues involve the men in their lives: fathers, employers, and husbands. As educated women from wealthy backgrounds, they must work to be independent at a time when a woman’s role was still limited to marriage and childbirth.
The plot is influenced by the sociopolitical and economic atmosphere of the time.
Over the course of the book, the reader is exposed to the women’s views on different subjects, from politics to psychoanalysis.
A recent scholarly article about Mary McCarthy published in 2020 argued:
Mary McCarthy is one of America’s leading women intellectuals – fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, editor, and public intellectual. Her career spanned over fifty years as theatre editor of Partisan Review; autobiographical writer of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and the later Intellectual Memoirs and How I Grew; best-selling novelist of The Group; satirist of the New York intellectual scene in The Oasis and The Groves of Academe; public intellectual and reporter on the war in Vietnam, the Medina Trial, and the Watergate Hearings; and recipient of the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal. […]
There was a moment in the early 1990s when we seemed to be experiencing a Mary McCarthy revival. After her passing in 1989 there were the largely laudatory remembrances, the posthumous publication of the second installment of her later autobiography, Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936–38 (1992), Carol Brightman’s biography of McCarthy, Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992), followed by the collection of her correspondence with longtime friend and intellectual compatriot, Hannah Arendt, Between Friends: the Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (1995). In 1993 a conference on McCarthy was held at Bard College – where she once taught and what many consider the model for her satiric portrait, The Groves of Academe – which culminated in the publication of Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and her Work (1996), edited by then executors of the Mary McCarthy literary trust, Stwertka and Viscusi. At the time I was a doctoral student at Columbia University, writing my dissertation on Mary McCarthy and the postwar intellectual, based on newly available archival materials bequeathed to Vassar College after the author’s death, which was later published as; Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics and the Postwar Intellectual (2004). This, surprisingly, is still the only book-length study of Mary McCarthy as a fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, and public intellectual. Why has McCarthy’s literary contribution continued to be overlooked or downplayed beside her celebrity as a biographical subject? The answer lies perhaps with her place as a sharp woman of intellect and passion […]
We are in the midst of another Mary McCarthy moment, one that will hopefully have lasting impact. With the recent publication of Mary McCarthy’s complete fiction and the anticipated collection of her nonfiction by Library of America, along with the electronic publication of her fiction, memoirs, travel writing, essays, and political writing by Open Road Media starting in 2014, Mary McCarthy’s oeuvre is more accessible than ever. Further, she is the subject of a number of collected portraits of fierce and fabulous women intellectuals who had strong opinions and were not afraid to voice them, notable among them Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (2017) and Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (2018), both reviewed in this volume. […]
Who is Mary McCarthy and why has her literary contribution been somewhat overlooked or undervalued? Mary McCarthy is one of the leading American women intellectuals who was affiliated with the anti-Stalinist journal, Partisan Review, in the 1930s and had an influential career as a fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, and public intellectual through the 1970s. The daughter of an Irish Catholic father and a part-Protestant, part-Jewish mother, McCarthy was raised by her austere Catholic aunt and uncle in Minneapolis and later by her Protestant grandfather, a prominent lawyer in Seattle, Washington and her Jewish grandmother after the death of her parents from influenza when she was six years old. This unorthodox upbringing is the subject of her famed autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), and shaped her marginalized identity among the largely Jewish, New York intellectual scene in later life. McCarthy went East to Vassar for her college years, which became the subject of her best-selling novel, The Group (1963). At Vassar she briefly formed a rebel literary magazine, Con Spirito, with fellow classmates Elizabeth Bishop and Frani Blough. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)