ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942) and its episodic short stories that read like memoir and create a composite portrait of a character when assembled. Her fiction for Partisan Review and The Southern Review conveys the struggle of a young woman, Margaret Sargent, trying to find herself in New York City while avoiding obstacles posed by her gender and class. Magazines that were the voice of the intelligentsia were the ones publishing McCarthy’s stories, perhaps because these periodicals grappled with their own ambivalence about defining themselves too narrowly or not consistently enough—the same conflict that McCarthy and her character Margaret faced.
