Group, The, with Manuscript Outline
Mary McCarthy To Jim And Gloria Jones:
A Presentation Copy Of “The Group,”
Complete With Mccarthy’s Handwritten Outline
McCarthy, Mary. The Group. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.
8vo.; blue-gray cloth; blue, gray, and red dust-jacket, top edge of jacket faintly water-stained, dramatic (3/4”) cigarette burn to jacket front cover, not affecting text. Housed in a specially built cloth folding box, which also holds (in an interior envelope) a leaf of brown paper, copiously annotated by McCarthy.
First edition. A rare presentation copy of the novel that catapulted McCarthy to international fame, inscribed: To Jim and Gloria Jones from their friend and enthusiast, Mary McCarthy. With a page of annotations in McCarthy’s hand. And with a partial matchstick between pages 268 and 269. McCarthy became close friends with both novelist James Jones and his wife Gloria during the 1950s, when all resided in Paris.
The Group traces the linked lives of five young women from their undergraduate days at a women’s college closely modeled on Vassar (McCarthy’s alma mater) through middle age. A modern feminist classic, its fame was due in part to its open discussion of such previously taboo topics—for female characters, created by a female author—as birth control, homosexuality, divorce, adultery, and abortion.
This unique copy of The Group comes complete with McCarthy’s handwritten outline of the novel, penned on a leaf of brown butcher block paper. McCarthy’s schema includes notes in her hand about the book’s then-scandalous characters, such as: “Dottie...fairly rich virgin with cough....Elinor-Lakey. The beauty-rich. Libby: gossip English major-writer-blonde...” This outline was assumedly composed by McCarthy well in advance of the book’s publication; Jones preserved it–along with the scorched “true” dust-jacket, probably a casualty of the chain-smoking McCarthy’s cigarettes–with his presentation copy of the novel.
(#900)
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