Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World

Carol Brightman (1939–2019) was an American author best known for her biography Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World (1992), which won the National Book Critics Circle Biography/Autobiography Award, and for editing Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy (1995), earning her an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature; she also wrote Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure (1999). A 1960s anti-war activist who co-founded Viet-Report and led the Venceremos Brigade to Cuba, she transitioned to literary biography after teaching and editing.