The Oasis, McCarthy's second novel, won a contest orgnized by Cyril Connelly, the British critic and editor of the prestigious literary magazine Horizon, and was first published as the February 1949 edition of that magazine. Connelly called the book "brilliant and true and funny and beautifully written and intelligently thought and felt."
The Oasis is a wickedly satiric roman a clef about a group of urban American intellectuals who try unsuccessfully to establish a rural utopian colony just as the Cold War is setting in and fear of the atomic bomb is reaching panic proportions. At its appearance a few months later in the U.S., the novel caused a scandel, alienating a number of McCarthy's friends.
One of her former lovers, the critic Philip Rahv, was so upset at the character based on him that he tried to stop its publication. At the same time, a then relatively new acquaintance who later became McCarthy's closest friend, Hannah Arendt, wrote her: "I just read The Oasis and must tell you that it was pure delight. You have written a veritable little masterpiece."
