Between Friends - The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975
They first met in New York: Mary McCarthy, an American writer, and Hannah Arend, a philosopher who had fled Nazi Germany. They soon brecame friends and began a remarkable 25 year exchange. McCarthy was an ardent, if not irrepressible correspondent, whose letters reveal her discriminating intelligence, her incisive wit and her delight in writing as a way of ordering experience. Arendt's letters bring her gruff, tender voice and keen mind to light on the page. Even as these two cultural warriors traded ideas about politics, literature and morality, they also shared delicious gossip and intimate domestic details. Between Friends, edited and `astutely introduced' by Carol Brightman brings together their remarkable epistolary dialogue in its entirety...