Between Friends

the long version

They first met in New York: Mary McCarthy, an American writer, and Hannah Arendt, a philosopher who had fled Nazi Germany. They soon became friends and began a remarkable twenty-five-year exchange. McCarthy was an ardent, if not irrepressible, correspondent, whose letters served her autobiographical impulse and her delight in writing as a way of ordering experience. Arendt's letters bring her gruff, tender voice and keen intelligence to life on the page. Even as they traded ideas about politics, literature, morality, they also shared personal advice and delightful gossip. Between Friends, edited and with an introduction by Carol Brightman, brings together their remarkable epistolary dialogue in its entirety. Engrossing and entertaining, it gives us a fresh and intimate view of the long and unique friendship between two eminent intellectual presences of the twentieth century.