Restart
1 of 5
Mary McCarthy famously blasted a literary nemesis during a 1979 recording of “The Dick Cavett Show” with the line, “Every word she writes is a lie — including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Whom was she talking about?
- A Eudora Welty
- B Lillian Hellman
- C Carson McCullers
- D Flannery O’Connor
That's Correct!
It's Wrong!
From Lillian Hellman’s 1984 obituary in The Times:
The playwright also, in 1979, plunged into a headlong feud with the novelist Mary McCarthy after Miss McCarthy, in a television interview, characterized Miss Hellman as “a dishonest writer” whose every word, “including ‘and’ and ‘the,’” was a “lie.” Miss Hellman sued Miss McCarthy, the Educational Television Corporation and the interviewer, Dick Cavett, for damages of $1.75 million for “mental pain and anguish.”
