Mary McCarthy — or at least conversations about her — will make a cameo appearance in my dissertation.  What does Mary McCarthy have to do with the canon wars at Stanford?  That’s an interesting story (for me, anyhow), and I think it will make for an interesting chapter.  In the meantime, I have been puzzling over a different but somewhat related problem. It has seemed to me that Mary McCarthy often makes “cameo appearances” in scholarly works about the New York intellectuals as a group or as individuals.  She shows up here and there in Jumonville’s Critical Crossings, and she Read more