Mary McCarthy (1912-1989), novelist, critic, and political activist, was born in Seattle and orphaned at age six, thereafter raised by various relatives in Minnesota and Washington. She graduated from Vassar College in 1933 and went on to work as a critic for The New Republic, The Nation, and the Partisan Review, for which she was an editor from 1937 to 1948. She married four times, most notably in 1938 to the critic Edmund Wilson. She is the author of seven novels as well as many other volumes of autobiography, travelogues, essays, and criticism.

Thomas Mallon, editor, is the author of eight novels, including Watergate and Fellow Travelers, as well as seven books of nonfiction. He directs the creative writing program at The George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.

In the second volume of the definitive edition of her fiction, three novels by the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation, including the landmark classic The Group.

In Mary McCarthy's most famous novel, The Group (1963), she depicts the lives of eight Vassar College graduates during the 1930s as they grapple with sex, sexism, money, motherhood, and family. McCarthy's final two novels--Birds of America (1971), a coming of age tale of 19-year-old Peter Levi, who travels to Europe during the 1960s, and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), a thriller about a group of passengers taken hostage on an airplane by militant hijackers--are both concerned with the state of modern society, from the cross-currents of radical social change to the psychology of terrorism. As a special feature, this second volume contains McCarthy's 1979 essay "The Novels that Got Away," on her unfinished fiction.