May 1, 1985

The college made public its acquisition of the papers of author Mary McCarthy ‘33. The papers included over 6,500 pages of manuscripts, legal papers, personal notes, correspondence and galleys. McCarthy, 72, told Deirdre Carmody from The New York Times she was “really strongly tempted” two years earlier when President Smith had first spoken to her about the papers, because “I have nice feelings about Vassar.”

Neither McCarthy nor Smith revealed what the college had paid for the collection, but President Smith made clear that funds had come from private donors. The McCarthy papers, she said, would strengthen Vassar’s tradition of having students deal with original source material wherever possible. McCarthy was best known for her 1963 novel The Group, a fictionalized account of her life after graduating from Vassar, as well as those of several of her classmates. The New York Times