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This introduction to the Mary McCarthy special issue of Women's Studies asks, why Mary McCarthy? Why now? Mary McCarthy is one of America's leading women intellectuals - fiction writer, literary and cultural critic, editor, and public intellectual. Her career spanned over fifty years as theatre editor of Partisan Review; autobiographical writer of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood and the later Intellectual Memoirs and How I Grew; best-selling novelist of The Group; satirist of the New York intellectual scene in The Oasis and The Groves of Academe; public intellectual and reporter on the war in Vietnam, the Medina Trial, and the Watergate Hearings; and recipient of the National Medal for Literature and the MacDowell Medal. Yet her literary and critical contribution have been largely eclipsed by her cultural celebrity as a sharp wit with an acerbic tongue, striking good looks, and a penchant for taking on taboo subjects of female sexuality. This essay looks at how limited gender expectations have shaped McCarthy's reputation as a "modern American bitch" and "our leading bitch-intellectual," and why new feminist readers are ready to embrace her distinction as a smart, sharp, sexy woman of wit