The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties by Jonathan Leaf

Still, there have been at least three full-length biographies of McCarthy, plus a son’s reminiscences, and a Broadway play about her contretemps with Hellman.

Although a lifelong leftist, she is adjudged (if she is thought of by bien-pensant intellectuals at all) as a conceited, viperish figure who took delight in attacking such patron saints as Lillian Hellman. Nor does McCarthy have a partisan cheering section any longer, if she ever had one. Yet it is rarely assigned-or even well regarded-in colleges and while highly entertaining, The Group is not generally recognized as a classic, is not romantic, and is not a potboiler. In 2009, Leaf published his first full-length nonfiction book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties, in which he attacks popular perceptions of the 1960s as a radical decade dominated by hippies, rock music and free love.The centenary of Mary McCarthy’s birth falls on this year’s summer solstice, and August is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her most famous novel, The Group, which sold more than five million copies by the time of McCarthy’s death in 1989, and continues to sell. Leaf has also been a contributor and editor at the Web journal New Partisan, and he has written for The New York Press, where he served as the Arts editor. During the course of its four-week run, it was the highest rated show in New York according to audience surveys on the Theatermania website.Ī former New York City public school teacher, Leaf has written both about education and about the arts and culture for such publications as The Weekly Standard, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The American and National Review. Praised by The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and, among others, the play ran in January 2007 at the Upper West Side's Arclight Theater. Leaf's follow-up to The Caterers was The Germans In Paris. In June 2006, he was featured in Time Out New York magazine in an article on America's most important young playwrights and compared to Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow for his 'literacy and seriousness'. He is the writer of the off-Broadway play The Caterers, which was nominated for Best Full-Length Original Script of 2005-2006 in the Innovative Theater Awards. Jonathan Leaf is a playwright and journalist based out of New York City.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties by Jonathan Leaf