McCarthy, Cormac orig. Charles McCarthy, Jr. (b. July 20,1933, Providence, R.I., U.S.) U.S. novelist. He grew up in Tennessee and dropped out of the University of Tennessee to join the Air Force. He began writing in 1959. His novels, known for their natural observation, morbid realism, and violence, are in the Southern gothic tradition. They include The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Blood Meridian (1985), and the widely read Border Trilogy (. All the Pretty Little Horses, 1992; The Crossing, 1994; Cities of the Plain, 1999).
McCarthy, Eugene J(oseph) (b. March 29, 1916, Watkins, Minn., U.S.—d. Dec. 10, 2005, Washington, D.C.) U.S. politician. He taught at the College of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., before being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1949-59) and later the Senate (1959-71). A liberal Democrat, he became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. In 1968 he ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. His ini¬ tial successes convinced Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek reelection. After losing the nomination to Hubert H. Humphrey, McCarthy decided not to run for reelection to the Senate. He made another unsuccessful attempt at the Democratic nomination in 1972 and ran unsuccessfully for presi¬ dent as an independent in 1976. His presidential bids in 1988 and 1992 also failed.
McCarthy, John (b. Sept. 4, 1927, Boston, Mass., U.S.) U.S. computer scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, he created LISP in 1958. He also devel¬
oped ideas about the processing characteristics of trees (as used in com¬ puting), as distinct from nets. He is a recipient of the Turing Award (1971), the Kyoto Prize (1988), and the National Medal of Science (1990).
McCarthy, Joseph R(aymond) (b. Nov. 14, 1908, near Appleton, Wis., U.S.—d. May 2, 1957, Bethesda, Md.) U.S. politician. He was a Wisconsin circuit judge (1940^42) before enlisting in the Marine Corps in World War II. In 1946 he upset Robert La Follette, Jr., to win election to the U.S. Senate. He remained little known until 1950, when he pub¬ licly charged that 205 communists had infiltrated the U.S. State Depart¬ ment. Reelected in 1952, he obtained the chairmanship of the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, and for the next two years he investigated various government departments and questioned innumerable witnesses about their suspected communist affiliations. To his supporters, McCarthy was a dedicated patriot and a guardian of genuine American¬ ism; to his detractors, he was an irresponsible witch-hunter who was undermining the nation’s traditions of civil liberties. The persecution of innocent persons on the charge of being communists and the forced con¬ formity that this practice engendered in American public life came to be known as McCarthyism. His influence waned after 1954, when exposure of his truculent interrogative tactics in nationally televised hearings helped to turn public opinion against him. Later that year he was censured by the Senate for conduct “contrary to Senate traditions.”
McCarthy, Mary (Therese) (b. June 21, 1912, Seattle, Wash., U.S.—d. Oct. 25, 1989, New York, N.Y.) U.S. novelist and critic. She served on the editorial staff of the Partisan Review from 1937 to 1948. She began writing fiction at the urging of her second husband, Edmund Wilson. Her work is noted for bitingly satiric commentaries on marriage, the impotence of intellectuals, and the role of women in contemporary urban America. Her novels include The Company She Keeps (1942); The Group (1963), her most popular work; Birds of America (1971); and Can¬ nibals and Missionaries (1979). She also wrote two autobiographies. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987).
McCartney, Sir (James) Paul (b. June 18, 1942, Liverpool, Eng.) British singer and songwriter. Bom to a working-class family, he learned piano but switched to guitar after hearing American rock-and-roll record¬ ings. In the mid-1950s he met John Lennon, with whom he formed the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles. He and Lennon cowrote scores of songs, including some of the most popular songs of the 20th century. He released his first solo album in 1970. With his wife, the pho¬ tographer Linda Eastman (1941-98), he formed the group Wings; their hit albums include Band on the Run (1973) and Wings at the Speed of Sound (1976). After the band dissolved, McCartney had a string of hits in the 1980s. In Rio de Janeiro in 1990, he set a world record by per¬ forming before a paying audience of more than 184,000. He was knighted in 1997.
McCarty, Maclyn (b. June 9, 1911, South Bend, Ind., U.S.—d. Jan. 2, 2005, New York, N.Y.) U.S. biologist. He received an M.D. (1937) at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. With Oswald Avery and Colin M. MacLeod he provided the first experimental evidence that the genetic material of living cells is composed of DNA. In their classic experiments (1944), the introduction of certain material from one type of pneumococ¬ cus bacteria into another type transformed the receiving bacteria into the type from which the material had been taken. The substance responsible for the change was DNA.
McClellan, George B(rinton) (b. Dec. 3, 1826, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—d. Oct. 29, 1885, Orange, N.J.) U.S. Army officer. After graduat¬ ing from West Point, he served in the Mexican War and then returned to West Point to teach military engineering. In 1855-56 he undertook a mis¬ sion to the Crimea to study European methods of warfare. In 1857 he resigned his commission to become chief of engineering for the Illinois Central Railroad (1857); he became president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad in 1860. At the outbreak of the American Civil War he was com¬ missioned in the regular army and placed in command of the department of the Ohio. Appointed general in chief of the army by Abraham Lincoln in 1861, he organized the army into an efficient fighting force but refused to take the offensive in the fall of that year, prompting Lincoln to issue his General War Order (1862) calling for forward movement of all armies. McClellan cautiously conducted the Peninsular Campaign but failed to take Richmond, and he fought indecisively in the Seven Days' Battles. At the Battle of Antietam he failed to destroy Robert E. Lee’s army, and Lin¬ coln removed him from command. In 1864 he was the unsuccessful
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McClintock ► McFadden I 1221
Democratic candidate for president against Lincoln. From 1872 to 1877 he was president of the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad.
McClintock, Barbara (b. June 16, 1902, Hartford, Conn., U.S.—d. Sept. 2, 1992, Huntington, N.Y.) U.S. geneticist. She received her doc¬ torate from Cornell University. In the 1940s and ’50s, her experiments with variations in the coloration of kernels of com revealed that genetic information is not stationary. She isolated two control elements in genetic material and found not only that they moved but that the change in posi¬ tion affected the behaviour of neighbouring genes, and she suggested that these elements were responsible for the diversity in cells during an organ¬ ism’s development. Her pioneering research, whose importance was not recognized for many years, eventually resulted in her being awarded a 1983 Nobel Prize.
McClung, Clarence E(rwin) (b. April 6, 1870, Clayton, Calif., U.S.—d. Jan. 17, 1946, Swarthmore, Pa.) U.S. zoologist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. His study of the mechanisms of heredity led to his hypothesis (1901) that an extra, or accessory, chromo¬ some determined sex. The discovery of the sex-determining chromosome provided some of the earliest evidence that a given chromosome carries a definable set of hereditary traits. McClung also studied how the behav¬ iour of chromosomes in the sex cells of different organisms affects their heredity.