Cormac McCarthy

• 1. Introduction

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  Cormac McCarthy bought a portable Olivetti Lettera 32 at a Knoxville pawn shop for $50, shortly before a trip to Europe in the early 1960s. Over the next five decades he typed about five million words on it. He kept it running by blowing the dust out with a service station hose. In December 2009, Christie's put the machine up for auction and estimated it would sell for between $15,000 and $20,000. It sold for $254,500, and the proceeds went to the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy was not left without a typewriter. His friend John Miller bought him an identical model for $11, plus $19.95 for shipping. Book dealer Glenn Horowitz said the humble machine took on "a sort of talismanic quality" because of the fiction typed on it, "as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife". The man behind that cheap machine was an American novelist who died in 2023 and is now widely ranked among the greatest the country has produced. How did a writer who lived for years in poverty, and who rarely explained himself, earn that standing? What was it about his bare, unpunctuated sentences that made readers return to them? And why did he say he felt more at home among physicists and biologists than among other authors?

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• 2. A Knoxville Boyhood

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  Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on the 20th of July 1933. He was one of six children of Gladys Christina McGrail and Charles Joseph McCarthy, an Irish Catholic family. In 1937 they moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. They first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision. By 1941 they had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville. McCarthy later recalled, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks."

  At St. Mary's Parochial School and later Knoxville Catholic High School, he saw little value in classwork. He served as an altar boy at Knoxville's Church of the Immaculate Conception. One day a teacher asked the class about their hobbies, and he answered eagerly. As he put it, "I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home." A boyhood friend named Jim Long, who lived from 1930 to 2012, later turned up in the novel Suttree as a character called J-Bone.

  In 1951 McCarthy enrolled at the University of Tennessee to study liberal arts. His interest in writing began when a professor asked him to repunctuate a collection of eighteenth-century essays for a textbook. In 1953 he left to join the U.S. Air Force. Stationed in Alaska, he read voraciously, which he said was the first time he had ever done so. He returned to the university in 1957 and majored in English. Under the name C. J. McCarthy, Jr., he published two stories in the student magazine The Phoenix, called "Wake for Susan" and "A Drowning Incident". They earned him the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in both 1959 and 1960. In 1959 he dropped out for good and left for Chicago.

  He also changed his first name from Charles to Cormac. By one account, he wanted to avoid confusion, and comparison, with Charlie McCarthy, the dummy of the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. Cormac had been a family nickname that his Irish aunts gave to his father. Other sources say he took the name to honor the Irish chieftain Cormac MacCarthy, who built Blarney Castle. His life as a writer would begin in 1961, when he married a fellow student named Lee Holleman.

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• 3. Years Without Money

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  After the wedding to Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy moved with her to a shack in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside Knoxville. Her obituary describes it as having no heat and running water. Their son, Cullen, was born there in 1962. That same year, the childhood home of the writer James Agee was being demolished in Knoxville. McCarthy took bricks from the site and used them to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack. Holleman moved to Wyoming soon afterward and filed for divorce.

  In 1965 Random House published The Orchard Keeper, his first novel. He had finished it while working part time at an auto-parts warehouse in Chicago, then sent the manuscript "blindly" to an editor there named Albert Erskine. Critics noticed the echoes of Faulkner and praised the striking imagery. The book won a William Faulkner Foundation Award in 1966 as a notable first novel.

  The summer of 1965 brought a Traveling Fellowship from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. McCarthy shipped out on the liner Sylvania, hoping to reach Ireland. On board he met Anne DeLisle, an Englishwoman who worked on the ship as a dancer and singer. They married in England in 1966. That year a Rockefeller Foundation grant paid for travel around Southern Europe, and he landed in Ibiza. There he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark, which appeared in 1968 to generally favorable reviews. Money was never far from his mind. In New Orleans he was once evicted from a $40-a-month room in the French Quarter for not paying the rent. Wherever he traveled, he carried a 100-watt bulb in his bag so that he could read at night.

  In 1969 the couple settled in Louisville, Tennessee, and bought a dairy barn. McCarthy renovated it himself and did the stonework with his own hands. DeLisle said they lived in "total poverty" and bathed in a lake. She remembered that someone would phone to offer him $2,000 to speak at a university about his books. He would answer that everything he had to say was on the page, and she recalled, "So we would eat beans for another week." In the barn he wrote Child of God, published in 1973. Like Outer Dark, it was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976 he separated from DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas.

  Television briefly pulled him in another direction. In 1974 Richard Pearce of PBS asked him to write a screenplay for an episode of the drama series Visions. Starting in early 1975, the two men spent a year traveling the South to research industrialization there. Their only inspiration was a handful of photographs in the footnotes of a 1928 biography of the pre-Civil War industrialist William Gregg. McCarthy finished the script in 1976. The episode, titled The Gardener's Son, aired on the 6th of January 1977. Film festivals abroad screened it, and it earned two Primetime Emmy nominations that year.

  In 1979 came Suttree, a semiautobiographical novel drawn from his Knoxville days along the Tennessee River. He had worked on it over twenty years. The critic Jerome Charyn likened it to a doomed Huckleberry Finn and traced the main character's name to a yew tree in the author's sprawling Tennessee garden. Like his earlier novels, it won generally positive reviews and did not sell well. Two years later, a grant announced in 1981 would change where he could afford to go.

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• 4. The Bloodiest Book

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  In 1981 McCarthy received a MacArthur Fellowship worth $236,000. Saul Bellow, Shelby Foote and others had recommended him to the foundation. The money let him travel the American Southwest to research his next novel. It appeared in 1985 under the title Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.

  The New York Times called it the "bloodiest book since the Iliad". Many critics at first snubbed it, but its stature grew steadily in literary circles. Harold Bloom went on to call it "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying". In 2006 The New York Times Magazine polled authors and publishers on the best American novels of the previous quarter-century. Blood Meridian placed third, behind Toni Morrison's Beloved from 1987 and Don DeLillo's Underworld from 1997. Time put it on its 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. Some readers have gone further and suggested it is the Great American Novel.

  The author of that book was living in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center, which he himself described as "barely habitable". As of 1991, none of his novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies. For most of his career he did not even have an agent. Journalists settled on a label for him, the "best unknown novelist in America".

  The book's afterlife stretched beyond his own lifetime. When he died, McCarthy was listed as an executive producer on a film of Blood Meridian, to be directed by John Hillcoat. In a 2024 interview, Hillcoat said the two had spent long hours discussing it. McCarthy had even volunteered to write the script, and he pictured it as a "Faustian tale, the journey of the Judge trying to win the soul of the kid, and consume everything in his path." He turned down a miniseries proposal because he felt television lacks a "kind of grandeur about it, an element of scale."

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• 5. Late Recognition

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  Albert Erskine retired from Random House in 1992, after twenty years of editing McCarthy. McCarthy moved to Alfred A. Knopf, where Gary Fisketjon became his editor. As a final favor to Erskine, he agreed to an interview with Richard B. Woodward of The New York Times. He had given only smaller interviews back in the 1960s and 1970s.

  All the Pretty Horses, published in 1992, finally brought the wide recognition that had eluded him. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It became a New York Times bestseller and sold 190,000 hardcover copies within six months. The Crossing followed in 1994 and Cities of the Plain in 1998, completing the Border Trilogy. In the middle of that run, his second dramatic work, The Stonemason, was first performed in 1995.

  McCarthy first imagined No Country for Old Men as a screenplay and only then turned it into a novel. For that reason the 2005 book has little description of setting and is made up largely of dialogue. It is a western set in the 1980s. The Coen brothers adapted it into a 2007 film that won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and more than 75 film awards worldwide.

  In the early 2000s McCarthy was staying at an El Paso motel with his young son. Late one night he looked out the window and imagined the city in fifty or a hundred years. He saw "fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste". He wrote two pages on the idea. Four years later, in Ireland, he expanded them into his tenth novel, The Road. It follows a lone father and his young son across a post-apocalyptic America while cannibals hunt them. Many of the exchanges between the two were verbatim conversations he had had with his own son. Released in 2006, the book won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. McCarthy did not collect the Pulitzer in person, and sent Sonny Mehta in his place. John Hillcoat directed the 2009 film version, written by Joe Penhall and starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. It received mostly favorable reviews.

  Oprah Winfrey chose The Road as her Book Club selection for April 2007. McCarthy responded by agreeing to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on the 5th of June 2007. It was filmed in the library of the Santa Fe Institute. He told stories about the outright poverty he had endured as a writer. He also talked about becoming a father at an advanced age.

  The Sunset Limited, a play published in 2006, was so unorthodox that critics said it had more in common with a novel. McCarthy agreed, and subtitled it "a novel in dramatic form". He later adapted it into a 2011 film directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones, who also starred opposite Samuel L. Jackson. In 2012 he sold his original screenplay The Counselor to Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz and Steve Schwartz, the producers of the film of The Road. Ridley Scott directed, and the film reached theaters on the 25th of October 2013 to polarized reviews. Mark Kermode of The Guardian found it "datedly naff". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called it "a droning meditation on capitalism". Manohla Dargis of The New York Times found it "terrifying" and "seductive". By then McCarthy had spent years in the company of Santa Fe's scientists.

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• 6. Sentences and Method

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  McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred "simple declarative sentences". He used capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, and a colon to set off a list. He never used semicolons, which he labeled "idiocy". He left out quotation marks for dialogue because he saw no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks". Instead of commas he often strung clauses together with "and", a device called polysyndeton. It has been called "the most important word in McCarthy's lexicon". Professor Erik Hage notes that the dialogue often lacks attribution, yet "somehow... the reader remains oriented as to who is speaking."

  The habit went back to his student days in Tennessee. When he edited the professor's book, he stripped out much of the punctuation, and the professor was pleased. In 1996 he removed commas from W. Brian Arthur's influential Harvard Business Review article "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business". Arthur was a fellow member of the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy also copy edited work for the physicists Lawrence M. Krauss and Lisa Randall.

  Saul Bellow praised his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences". Richard B. Woodward described the prose as "reminiscent of early Hemingway". The style narrowed over time. Unlike Suttree and Blood Meridian, most of his work after 1993 relies on simple, restrained vocabulary.

  McCarthy spoke Spanish fluently, having lived in Ibiza in the 1960s and later in El Paso and Santa Fe. The scholar Isabel Soto argues that Spanish and English "modulate or permeate each other" in his novels. Katherine Sugg points to his abundant use of untranslated Spanish dialogue. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera adds that John Grady Cole, the hero of the Border Trilogy, is a native Spanish speaker. So is Judge Holden in Blood Meridian.

  He committed himself to writing full time and refused other jobs. "I always knew that I didn't want to work", he said. Scholar Steve Davis called his work ethic "incredible". In the mid-2000s he had four drafts going at once and gave each about two hours a day for several years. He researched the historical settings and regional landscapes of his fiction exhaustively. He sometimes revised a book for years or decades before releasing it. Yet he never outlined a plot, and he treated writing as a "subconscious process" that needed room for spontaneous inspiration.

  Violence runs through the books, and many readers have called them nihilistic, Blood Meridian above all. Some academics disagree and read it as a gnostic tragedy. His later work has been called highly moralistic. Erik J. Wielenberg argues that The Road presents morality as secular, rooted in individuals such as the father rather than in God. The inhuman antagonist Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men is said to reflect the anxiety of the post-9/11 era. Authority often fails in these books. The Glanton Gang's murder spree in Blood Meridian is driven by bounties. Law enforcement is "overwhelmed" in No Country for Old Men, and the police are corrupt in All the Pretty Horses. Critics have therefore called him the "great pessimist of American literature".

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• 7. Scientists and Solitude

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  Murray Gell-Mann once explained how McCarthy ended up at the Santa Fe Institute, a research center devoted to complex adaptive systems. "There isn't any place like the Santa Fe Institute, and there isn't any writer like Cormac, so the two fit quite well together." McCarthy served as a trustee although, unlike most members, he had no scientific training. In 2012 he was also elected to the American Philosophical Society.

  The institute produced his first nonfiction in a writing career of fifty years. That essay, "The Kekulé Problem", appeared in 2017. It examines a dream of the chemist August Kekulé as a model of the unconscious mind and the origins of language. McCarthy wrote that the unconscious "is a machine for operating an animal", and that all animals have one. He argued that language is a purely human cultural creation rather than a biologically determined one.

  In 2015 the Lannan Foundation announced his next novel, The Passenger, at a multimedia event in Santa Fe. Biologist David Krakauer of the institute described it as "full-blown Cormac 3.0", a mathematical and analytical novel. It was published on the 25th of October 2022. Its companion, Stella Maris, followed on the 6th of December 2022. In March 2022, The New York Times had reported a release date of the 22nd of November for it. Stella Maris was his first novel since Outer Dark to feature a female protagonist.

  McCarthy told Winfrey that he did not know any writers and much preferred the company of scientists. At MacArthur reunions he skipped his fellow authors to spend time with the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the whale biologist Roger Payne. He said, "What physicists did in the 20th century was one of the extraordinary flowerings ever in the human enterprise." He also said, "Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list."

  His literary tastes were just as firm. He respected only authors who "deal with issues of life and death", and he named Henry James and Marcel Proust as writers who do not. He had no interest in magical realism, since "it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible." His favorite novel was Moby-Dick, from 1851. He also counted The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury as great.

  His private life was equally unconventional. He quit drinking in 1976 in El Paso, and told Woodward that the friends he kept were people who had also quit. His long-time friend Augusta Britt later claimed he had resumed drinking near the end of his life. In the 1980s he and the writer Edward Abbey considered secretly releasing wolves into southern Arizona to restore their decimated population. In the late 1990s he moved to Tesuque, New Mexico, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. They divorced in 2006.

  He kept his politics to himself. Academic David Holloway writes that the books can be read as liberal, conservative, or both at once, depending on the reader. Living in Santa Fe, McCarthy once complained of the city, "If you don't agree with them politically, you can't just agree to disagree, they think you're crazy." Not everyone could be certain he was alive, though, once the internet took an interest in him.

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• 8. Legacy and Reckoning

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  In 2013 the Scottish writer Michael Crossan opened a Twitter account impersonating McCarthy, and it gathered several thousand followers within hours. Site owner Jack Dorsey recognized it. Five hours after its creation, McCarthy's publisher confirmed it was fake and that McCarthy did not own a computer. Another impersonator account appeared in 2018, and in 2021 it was briefly marked verified after a viral tweet. His agent again confirmed it was false. In 2016 a hoax claimed he had died, and even USA Today repeated it. The Los Angeles Times answered with the headline "Cormac McCarthy isn't dead. He's too tough to die."

  He died at his home in Santa Fe on the 13th of June 2023, at the age of 89. Stephen King called him "maybe the greatest American novelist of my time" and wrote, "I still mourn his passing." His output had been twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays and three short stories, across the Western, post-apocalyptic and Southern Gothic genres.

  In 2024 Vanity Fair published an article about his 47-year relationship with Augusta Britt. He met her in 1976 at a motel in Arizona, when he was 42 and she was 16. According to the article, she was living in a foster home and had been in and out of foster care for the previous five years. The article claims that in 1977, when she was 17, McCarthy forged her birth certificate and took her to Mexico, where he began having sex with her. Britt says the trip, from El Paso to Juarez, began after Albert Erskine told McCarthy that the FBI was looking for them. In her account, McCarthy "was wanted for statutory rape and the Mann Act." Britt maintains throughout the article that the relationship was neither predatory nor abusive. She and McCarthy stayed in close contact until his death. He drew on their early experiences for Suttree.

  In 2003 Harold Bloom named McCarthy as one of four major living American novelists, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. Nine years earlier, Bloom's book The Western Canon had predicted that Child of God, Suttree and Blood Meridian would become canonical. He held his other novels in lower regard. Of Blood Meridian he wrote, "He has attained genius with that book."

  A large archive of McCarthy's papers is kept at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. It fills 98 boxes, or 46 linear feet. The acquisition grew out of years of conversations between McCarthy and Bill Wittliff, who founded the Southwestern Writers Collection. The collections also hold the Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, made up of letters between McCarthy and the bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer.

  When he died, McCarthy left behind a library of roughly 20,000 books. More than 2,000 of them carry his own handwritten annotations. He rarely spoke about his work or the authors who shaped it, so those margins may offer the closest look at his thinking. The Cormac McCarthy Library Project plans an open-access searchable database of every volume, available to anyone without restrictions. An article about the library appeared in the September/October issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

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