The Oasis

A Novel

Author Mary McCarthy

Introduction by Vivian Gornick

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A vicious and brilliant satire of human vanity from the author of the classic bestseller The Group

Long out of print, Mary McCarthy's second novel is a bitingly funny satire set in the early years of the Cold War about a group of writers, editors, and intellectuals who retreat to rural New England to found a hilltop utopia. With this group loosely divided into two factions—purists, led by the libertarian editor Macdougal Macdermott, and the realists, skeptics led by the smug Will Taub—the situation is ripe not only for disaster but for comedy, as reality clashes with their dreams of a perfect society.

Though written as a roman à clef, McCarthy barely disguised her characters, including using her former lover Philip Rahv, founder…

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June 18, 2013

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MARY MCCARTHY was born in Seattle on June 21, 1912. When her parents died in 1918 she was deposited with relations, as memorialized in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, into ''circumstances of almost Dickensian cruelty and squalor." She later lived with Philip Rahv, whose Partisan Review she joined in 1937, and married eminent critic Edmund Wilson in 1938, the second of four marriages. Her scandalous, 1963 novel The Group spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Appalled by the book, Vassar College tried to revoke her degree. She died October 25, 1989 at New York Hospital.