The Group, inscribed, 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 James Jones and his wife Gloria in 1950s Paris.
THE GROUP follows the interconnected lives of five young women from their undergraduate days at a stand-in for McCarthy's alma mater, Vassar College, through the ensuing decades. It remains a modern feminist classic due in part to its open discussion of previously taboo topics such as birth control, homosexuality, divorce, adultery, and abortion, explored by female characters in a novel written by a woman.
Also present is McCarthy’s manuscript outline, composed on a leaf of brown butcher 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...” Jones preserved the outline, along with the scorched dust-jacket - probably a casualty of the chain-smoking McCarthy’s cigarettes, perhaps the one lit by the enclosed partial match! – with his presentation copy of the novel.
(#900)
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