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Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy in 1973
Born	Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. (1933-07-20)July 20, 1933 Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Died	June 13, 2023(2023-06-13) (aged 89) Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist playwright screenwriter
Education	University of Tennessee (no degree)
Genre	Southern gothic western post-apocalyptic
Notable works	Suttree (1979) Blood Meridian (1985) The Border Trilogy (1992–1998) No Country for Old Men (2005) The Road (2006)
Spouses	Lee Holleman ​ ​(m. 1961; div. 1962)​ Anne DeLisle ​ ​(m. 1966; div. 1981)​ Jennifer Winkley ​ ​(m. 1997; div. 2006)​
Children	2
Signature

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.; July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023) was an American author who wrote twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western, postapocalyptic, and Southern Gothic genres. His works often include graphic depictions of violence, and his writing style is characterised by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, although he was raised primarily in Tennessee. In 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tennessee, but dropped out to join the U.S. Air Force. His debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. Awarded literary grants, McCarthy was able to travel to southern Europe, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Suttree (1979), like his other early novels, received generally positive reviews, but was not a commercial success. A MacArthur Fellowship enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researched and wrote his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985). Although it initially garnered a lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since been regarded as his magnum opus, with some labeling it the Great American Novel.

McCarthy first experienced widespread success with All the Pretty Horses (1992), for which he received both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing The Border Trilogy. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men received mixed reviews. His 2006 novel The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Many of McCarthy's works have been adapted into film. The 2007 film adaptation of No Country for Old Men was a critical and commercial success, winning four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The films All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God were also adapted from his works of the same names, and Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute short. McCarthy had a play adapted into a 2011 film, The Sunset Limited.

McCarthy worked with the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, where he published the essay "The Kekulé Problem" (2017), which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012. His final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published on October 25, 2022, and December 6, 2022, respectively.

Life

Early life

Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933, one of six children of Gladys Christina McGrail and Charles Joseph McCarthy. His family was Irish Catholic. In 1937, the family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The family first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941, had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville. McCarthy later said, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks." Among his childhood friends was Jim Long (1930–2012), who was later depicted as J-Bone in Suttree.

McCarthy attended St. Mary's Parochial School and Knoxville Catholic High School, and was an altar boy at Knoxville's Church of the Immaculate Conception. As a child, McCarthy saw no value in school, preferring to pursue his own interests. He described a moment when his teacher asked the class about their hobbies. McCarthy answered eagerly, as he later said, "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."

In 1951, he began attending the University of Tennessee, studying liberal arts. He became interested in writing after a professor asked him to repunctuate a collection of eighteenth-century essays for inclusion in a textbook. McCarthy left college in 1953 to join the U.S. Air Force. While stationed in Alaska, McCarthy read books voraciously, which he said was the first time he had done so. He returned to the University of Tennessee in 1957, where he majored in English and published two stories, "Wake for Susan" and "A Drowning Incident" in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, writing under the name C. J. McCarthy, Jr. For these, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. In 1959, McCarthy dropped out of college and left for Chicago.

For the purpose of his writing career, McCarthy changed his first name from Charles to Cormac to avoid confusion, and comparison, with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy. Cormac had been a family nickname given to his father by his Irish aunts. Other sources say he changed his name to honor the Irish chieftain Cormac MacCarthy, who constructed Blarney Castle.

After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy moved to what Lee's obituary calls "a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville." There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack. Lee moved to Wyoming shortly after, where she filed for divorce from McCarthy.

Early writing career (1965–1991)

In 1965, Random House published McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965). He had finished the novel while working part time at an auto-parts warehouse in Chicago and submitted the manuscript "blindly" to Albert Erskine of Random House. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy's work for the next 20 years. Upon its release, critics noted its similarity to the work of Faulkner and praised McCarthy's striking use of imagery. The Orchard Keeper won a 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel.

While living in the French Quarter in New Orleans, McCarthy was evicted from a $40-a-month room for failing to pay his rent. When he traveled the country, McCarthy always carried a 100-watt bulb in his bag so he could read at night, no matter where he was sleeping.

In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania hoping to visit Ireland. On the ship, he met Englishwoman Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a dancer and singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Afterward, he returned to the United States with his wife, where Outer Dark was published to generally favorable reviews.

In 1969, the couple moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a dairy barn, which McCarthy renovated, doing the stonework himself. According to DeLisle, the couple lived in "total poverty", bathing in a lake. DeLisle claimed, "Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." While living in the barn, he wrote his next book, Child of God (1973). Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas.

In 1974, Richard Pearce of PBS contacted McCarthy and asked him to write the screenplay for an episode of Visions, a television drama series. Beginning in early 1975, and armed with only "a few photographs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre-Civil War industrialist William Gregg as inspiration", McCarthy and Pearce spent a year traveling the South to research the subject of industrialization there. McCarthy completed the screenplay in 1976 and the episode, titled The Gardener's Son, aired on January 6, 1977. Numerous film festivals abroad screened it. The episode was nominated for two Primetime Emmy awards in 1977.

In 1976, when McCarthy was 42, he met then-16-year-old Finnish-American Augusta Britt at a motel in Arizona. Despite their age difference, the two hit it off immediately, and he drew upon their experiences for Suttree, his work-in-progress at the time. By the following year, in 1977, when he was 43, but she was still 17, on a shared trip to Mexico, they had progressed to a physical relationship. They remained friends until his death.

In 1979, McCarthy published his semiautobiographical Suttree, which he had written over 20 years before, based on his experiences in Knoxville on the Tennessee River. Jerome Charyn likened it to a doomed Huckleberry Finn, noting how the Yew tree of the author's sprawling Tennessee garden was inspiration for the "christening of what became the principal character's name."

In 1981, McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship worth $236,000. Saul Bellow, Shelby Foote, and others had recommended him to the organization. The grant enabled him to travel the American Southwest to research his next novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). The book is violent, with The New York Times declaring it the "bloodiest book since the Iliad". Although snubbed by many critics, the book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles; Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying". In a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Some have even suggested it is the Great American Novel. Time included it on their 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. At the time, McCarthy was living in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center, which he described as "barely habitable".

As of 1991, none of McCarthy's novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies, and "for most of his career, he did not even have an agent". He was labeled the "best unknown novelist in America".

Success and acclaim (1992–2013)

External videos
McCarthy's 2007 interview with Oprah Winfrey (5:51) via Oprah.com

After working with McCarthy for twenty years, Albert Erskine retired from Random House in 1992. McCarthy turned to Alfred A. Knopf, where he fell under the editorial advisement of Gary Fisketjon. As a final favor to Erskine, McCarthy agreed to his first interview ever, with Richard B. Woodward of The New York Times.

McCarthy finally received widespread recognition following the publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), when it won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It became a New York Times bestseller, selling 190,000 hardcover copies within six months. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing the Border Trilogy. In the midst of this trilogy came The Stonemason (first performed in 1995), his second dramatic work. McCarthy originally conceived his next work, No Country for Old Men (2005), as a screenplay before turning it into a novel. Consequently, the novel has little description of setting and is composed largely of dialogue. A western set in the 1980s, No Country for Old Men was adapted by the Coen brothers into a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awards globally.

In the early 2000s while staying at an El Paso motel with his young son, McCarthy looked out the window late one night and imagined what the city might look like in fifty or one hundred years and saw: "fires up on the hill and everything being laid to waste". He wrote two pages covering the idea; four years later in Ireland he expanded the idea into his tenth novel, The Road. It follows a lone father and his young son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America, hunted by cannibals. Many of the discussions between the two were verbatim conversations McCarthy had had with his son. Released in 2006, it won international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. McCarthy did not accept the prize in person, instead sending Sonny Mehta in his place. John Hillcoat directed the 2009 film adaptation, written by Joe Penhall, and starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Critics' reviews were mostly favorable: Roger Ebert found it "powerful" but lacking "emotional feeling", Peter Bradshaw noted "a guarded change of emphasis", while Dan Jolin found it to be a "faithful adaptation" of the "devastating novel".

McCarthy published the play The Sunset Limited in 2006. Critics noted it was unorthodox and may have had more in common with a novel, hence McCarthy's subtitle: "a novel in dramatic form". He later adapted it into a screenplay for a 2011 film, directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones, who also starred opposite Samuel L. Jackson. Oprah Winfrey selected McCarthy's The Road as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy told Winfrey that he did not know any writers and much preferred the company of scientists. During the interview, he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his son was the inspiration for The Road.

In 2012, McCarthy sold his original screenplay The Counselor to Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, and Steve Schwartz, who had previously produced the film adaptation of McCarthy's novel The Road. Directed by Ridley Scott, with the production finished in 2012, the film was released on October 25, 2013, to polarized critical reception. Mark Kermode of The Guardian found it "datedly naff", and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone described it as "a droning meditation on capitalism". However, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times found it "terrifying" and "seductive".

Santa Fe Institute (2014–2023)

McCarthy was a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. Unlike most members of the SFI, McCarthy did not have a scientific background. As Murray Gell-Mann explained, "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." From his work at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy published his first piece of nonfiction writing in his 50-year writing career. In the essay entitled "The Kekulé Problem" (2017), McCarthy analyzes a dream of August Kekulé's as a model of the unconscious mind and the origins of language. He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, "is a machine for operating an animal" and "all animals have an unconscious". McCarthy postulates that language is a purely human cultural creation and not a biologically determined phenomenon.

In 2015, McCarthy's next novel, The Passenger, was announced at a multimedia event hosted in Santa Fe by the Lannan Foundation. The book was influenced by his time among scientists; it has been described by SFI biologist David Krakauer as "full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical analytical novel". In March 2022, The New York Times reported that The Passenger would be released on October 25, 2022, and a second companion novel, Stella Maris, on November 22. The latter was McCarthy's first novel since Outer Dark to feature a female protagonist.

At the time of his death, McCarthy was listed as an executive producer on a film adaption of Blood Meridian, to be directed by John Hillcoat, who previously directed the film adaptation of The Road. In a 2024 interview, Hillcoat said he and McCarthy spent extended time discussing the film, which the author once volunteered to write and envisioned as a "Faustian tale, the journey of the Judge trying to win the soul of the kid, and consume everything in his path." McCarthy had rejected a miniseries proposal, finding television lacks a "kind of grandeur about it, an element of scale."

Writing approach and style

Syntax

He left the beer on the counter and went out and got the two packs of cigarettes and the binoculars and the pistol and slung the .270 over his shoulder and shut the truck door and came back in.

McCarthy used punctuation sparsely, even replacing most commas with "and" to create polysyndetons; it has been called "the most important word in McCarthy's lexicon". He told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred "simple declarative sentences" and that he used capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, or a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons, which he labeled as "idiocy". He did not use quotation marks for dialogue and believed there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks". Erik Hage notes that McCarthy's dialogue often lacks attribution, but that "somehow ... the reader remains oriented as to who is speaking." His attitude to punctuation dated to some editing work he did for a professor of English while enrolled at the University of Tennessee; he stripped out much of the punctuation in the book being edited, which pleased the professor. McCarthy edited fellow Santa Fe Institute Fellow W. Brian Arthur's influential article "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business", published in the Harvard Business Review in 1996, removing commas from the text. He also copy edited work for 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 has described his writing as "reminiscent of early Hemingway". Unlike earlier works such as Suttree and Blood Meridian, the majority of McCarthy's work after 1993 uses simple, restrained vocabulary.

Themes

There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

McCarthy's novels often depict explicit violence. Many of his works have been characterized as nihilistic, particularly Blood Meridian. Some academics dispute this, saying Blood Meridian is actually a gnostic tragedy. His later works have been characterized as highly moralistic. Erik J. Wielenberg argues that The Road depicts morality as secular and originating from individuals, such as the father, and separate from God.

The bleak outlook of the future, and the inhuman foreign antagonist Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, is said to reflect the apprehension of the post-9/11 era. Many of his works portray individuals in conflict with society and acting on instinct rather than on emotion or thought. Another theme throughout many of McCarthy's works is the ineptitude or inhumanity of those in authority and particularly in law enforcement. This is seen in Blood Meridian with the murder spree the Glanton Gang initiates because of the bounties, the "overwhelmed" law enforcement in No Country for Old Men, and the corrupt police officers in All the Pretty Horses. As a result, he has been labeled the "great pessimist of American literature".

Bilingual narrative practice

McCarthy was fluent in Spanish, having lived in Ibiza, Spain in the 1960s and later residing in El Paso, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Isabel Soto argues that after he learned the language, "Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other" in his novels, as it was "an essential part of McCarthy's expressive discourse". Katherine Sugg observes that McCarthy's writing is "often considered a 'multicultural' and 'bilingual' narrative practice, particularly for its abundant use of untranslated Spanish dialogue". Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes "John Grady Cole is a native speaker of Spanish. This is also the case of several other important characters in the Border Trilogy, including Billy Parhnam [sic], John Grady's mother (and possibly his grandfather and brothers), and perhaps Jimmy Blevins, each of whom are speakers of Spanish who were ostensibly born in the US political space into families with what are generally considered English-speaking surnames ... This is also the case of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian."

Work ethic and process

McCarthy dedicated himself to writing full time, choosing not to work other jobs to support his career. "I always knew that I didn't want to work", McCarthy said. "You have to be dedicated, but it was my number-one priority." Early in his career, his decision not to work sometimes subjected him and his family to poverty.

Nevertheless, according to scholar Steve Davis, McCarthy had an "incredible work ethic". He preferred to work on several projects simultaneously and said, for instance, that he had four drafts in progress in the mid-2000s and for several years devoted about two hours every day to each project. He was known to conduct exhaustive research on the historical settings and regional environments found in his fiction. He edited his own writing, sometimes revising a book over the course of years or decades before deeming it fit for publication. While his research and revision were meticulous, he did not outline his plots and instead viewed writing as a "subconscious process" which should be given space for spontaneous inspiration.

After 1958, McCarthy wrote all of his literary work and correspondence with a mechanical typewriter. He originally used a Royal but went looking for a more lightweight machine ahead of a trip to Europe in the early 1960s. He bought a portable Olivetti Lettera 32 for $50 at a Knoxville pawn shop and typed about five million words over the next five decades. He maintained it by simply "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". Book dealer Glenn Horowitz said the modest typewriter acquired "a sort of talismanic quality" through its connection to McCarthy's monumental fiction, "as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife". His Olivetti was auctioned in December 2009 at Christie's, with the auction house estimating it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000. It sold for $254,500, with proceeds donated to the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy replaced it with an identical model, bought for him by his friend John Miller for $11 plus $19.95 for shipping.

Personal life and views

McCarthy was a teetotaler. According to Richard B. Woodward, "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. 'The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,' he says. 'If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking'." However, his long-time friend Augusta Britt claimed that he had resumed drinking near the end of his life.

In the 1980s, McCarthy and Edward Abbey considered covertly releasing wolves into southern Arizona to restore their decimated population.

In the late 1990s, McCarthy moved to Tesuque, New Mexico, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. McCarthy and Winkley divorced in 2006.

In 2013, Scottish writer Michael Crossan created a Twitter account impersonating McCarthy, quickly amassing several thousand followers and recognition by former site owner Jack Dorsey. Five hours after the account's creation, McCarthy's publisher confirmed that the account was fake and that McCarthy did not own a computer. In 2018, another account impersonating McCarthy was created. In 2021, it was briefly marked verified following a viral tweet, after which his agent confirmed that the account was again a fake.

In 2016, a hoax spread on Twitter claiming that McCarthy had died, with USA Today even repeating the information. The Los Angeles Times responded to the hoax with the headline, "Cormac McCarthy isn't dead. He's too tough to die."

In 2024, Vanity Fair published an article about McCarthy's relationship with Augusta Britt, whom he met when he was 42 and she was 16. The article claims that he took her to Mexico with a forged birth certificate and began having sex with her when she was still 17. Britt has confirmed this account but denied that the relationship was predatory or abusive.

Politics

McCarthy did not publicly reveal his political opinions. A resident of Santa Fe with a traditionalist disposition, he once expressed disapproval of the city and the people there: "If you don't agree with them politically, you can't just agree to disagree—they think you're crazy." Academic David Holloway writes that "McCarthy's writing can be read as either liberal or conservative, or as both simultaneously, depending on the politics that readers themselves bring with them to the act of reading the work".

Science and literature

In one of his few interviews, McCarthy revealed that he respected only authors who "deal with issues of life and death", citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not. "I don't understand them ... To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange", he said. Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he was "not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible." He cited Moby-Dick (1851) as his favorite novel. Along with Moby-Dick, McCarthy regarded The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ulysses (1922), and The Sound and the Fury (1929) as "great" novels.

Socially, McCarthy had an aversion to other writers, preferring the company of scientists. He voiced his admiration for scientific advances: "What physicists did in the 20th century was one of the extraordinary flowerings ever in the human enterprise." At MacArthur reunions, McCarthy shunned his fellow writers to fraternize instead with scientists like physicist Murray Gell-Mann and whale biologist Roger Payne. Of all of his interests, McCarthy stated, "Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list."

Death

McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe on June 13, 2023, at the age of 89. Stephen King said McCarthy was "maybe the greatest American novelist of my time ... He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing."

Legacy

In 2003, literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy as one of the four major living American novelists, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth. Bloom's 1994 book The Western Canon had listed Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian among the works of contemporary literature he predicted would endure and become "canonical". Bloom reserved his highest praise for Blood Meridian, which he called "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying", and though he held less esteem for McCarthy's other novels he said that "to have written even one book so authentically strong and allusive, and capable of the perpetual reverberation that Blood Meridian possesses more than justifies him. ... He has attained genius with that book."

A comprehensive archive of McCarthy's personal papers is preserved at the Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas. The McCarthy papers consists of 98 boxes (46 linear feet). The acquisition of the Cormac McCarthy Papers resulted from years of ongoing conversations between McCarthy and Southwestern Writers Collection founder, Bill Wittliff, who negotiated the proceedings. The Southwestern Writers Collection/Wittliff Collections also holds The Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, which consists of letters between McCarthy and bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer, and four other related collections.

Bibliography

Novels

Notes

1. Its title originates from the 1926 poem "Sailing to Byzantium" by Irish poet W. B. Yeats.
2. The concept of post-apocalyptic cannibals spawned from a discussion McCarthy had with his brother.

References

1. ^ Cowley, Jason (January 12, 2008). "A shot rang out ..." The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on October 17, 2020. Retrieved October 24, 2020.
2. Draper, Robert (July 1992). "The Invisible Man". Texas Monthly. Archived from the original on July 21, 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2021.
3. Parker, Nicholas (July 20, 2017). "Where to Start with Cormac McCarthy". New York Public Library. Archived from the original on September 26, 2021. Retrieved July 21, 2021.
4. National Book Foundation; retrieved March 28, 2012.
   (With acceptance speech by McCarthy and essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
5. "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Archived from the original on April 5, 2023. Retrieved March 19, 2021.
6. ^ Alter, Alexandra (March 8, 2022). "Sixteen Years After 'The Road,' Cormac McCarthy Is Publishing Two New Novels". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on August 3, 2022. Retrieved January 13, 2023.
7. Don Williams. "Cormac McCarthy Crosses the Great Divide". New Millennium Writings. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016. Retrieved February 8, 2016.
8. Brown, Fred (January 29, 2009). "Sister: Childhood home made Cormac McCarthy". Knoxville News Sentinel. Archived from the original on November 24, 2010. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
9. Jurgensen, John (November 13, 2009). "Hollywood's Favorite Cowboy". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on August 2, 2017. Retrieved August 3, 2017.
10. ^ "Biography". CormacMcCarthy.com. Archived from the original on April 13, 2012. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
11. Neely, Jack (February 3, 2009). "'The House Where I Grew Up': A eulogy for a neglected landmark". metropulse. com. Archived from the original on July 28, 2013. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
12. ^ Woodward, Richard B. (April 19, 1992). "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 3, 2018. Retrieved April 21, 2020.
13. ^ Neely, Jack (September 19, 2012). "Jim "J-Bone" Long, 1930–2012: One Visit With a Not-Quite Fictional Character". metropulse.com. Archived from the original on December 31, 2013. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
14. Wallach, Rick (2013). You Would Not Believe What Watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy's Knoxville. Louisiana State University Press. p. 59. ISBN 978-0-8071-5422-9. Archived from the original on July 29, 2020. Retrieved February 17, 2021 – via google.ca.books.
15. ^ Adams, Tim (December 19, 2009). "Cormac McCarthy: America's great poetic visionary". The Guardian. Archived from the original on January 11, 2020. Retrieved April 25, 2020.
16. Frye, Steven (2020). "Life and Career". In Fyre, Steven (ed.). Cormac McCarthy in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–12. doi:10.1017/9781108772297.002. ISBN 978-1-108-77229-7. S2CID 234965059.
17. ^ Kushner, David (December 27, 2007). "'If It Doesn't Concern Life and Death, It's Not Interesting': Cormac McCarthy's American Odyssey". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on June 15, 2023.
18. Giemza, Bryan (July 8, 2013). Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South. LSU Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-5092-4. Retrieved November 29, 2017 – via Google Books.
19. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html
20. Hall, Michael (July 1998). "Desperately Seeking Cormac". Texas Monthly. Archived from the original on January 31, 2020. Retrieved April 25, 2020.
21. ^ "Obituary: Lee McCarthy". The Bakersfield Californian. March 29, 2009. Archived from the original on October 14, 2012. Retrieved March 16, 2012.
22. Brown, Paul F. (2018). Rufus: James Agee in Tennessee. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. pp. 251–52. ISBN 978-1-62190-424-3.
23. ^ Woodward, Richard B. (August 2005). "Cormac Country". Vanity Fair. Archived from the original on August 15, 2020. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
24. "Still Another Disciple of William Faulkner". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 7, 2020. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
25. "The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy". Kirkus Reviews. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
26. ^ "New Cormac McCarthy Book, 'The Passenger,' Unveiled". Newsweek. August 15, 2015. Archived from the original on March 18, 2020. Retrieved April 26, 2020.
27. ^ Arnold, Edwin (1999). Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-105-9.
28. Buckner, Mary (March 2, 1975). "Self-Satisfaction Novelist's Goal". Lexington Herald. p. E-4. Archived from the original on October 1, 2022. Retrieved October 1, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
29. Byrd, Martha (December 16, 1973). "East Tennessee Author Talks About His Works And His Life". Kingsport Times-News. p. 9-C. Archived from the original on October 1, 2022. Retrieved October 1, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
30. ^ Woodward, Richard (May 17, 1998). "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 20, 2020. Retrieved July 14, 2017.
31. ^ "The Gardener's Son". harpercollins.ca. Archived from the original on May 11, 2021. Retrieved February 17, 2021.
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40. Dalrymple, William. "Blood Meridian is the Great American Novel". Reader's Digest. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved May 4, 2020. McCarthy's descriptive powers make him the best prose stylist working today, and this book the Great American Novel.
41. Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo (October 16, 2005). "All Time 100 Novels – The Complete List". Time. Archived from the original on April 25, 2010. Retrieved June 3, 2008.
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44. The Stonemason. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 1994. ISBN 978-0-88001-359-8. Archived from the original on March 20, 2017. Retrieved January 31, 2017 – via UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.
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59. "Cormac McCarthy Sells First Spec Script". TheWrap. Archived from the original on July 7, 2017. Retrieved February 18, 2020.
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61. "Rolling Stone review". Rolling Stone. October 24, 2013. Archived from the original on January 16, 2020. Retrieved January 16, 2020.
62. Dargis, Manohla (October 24, 2013). "NY Times review". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 16, 2016. Retrieved January 16, 2020.
63. Romeo, Rick (April 22, 2017). "Cormac McCarthy explains the unconscious". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on July 9, 2020. Retrieved March 23, 2020.
64. McCarthy, Cormac (April 20, 2017). "The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?". Nautilus. No. 47. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved March 23, 2020.
65. Kroll, Justin (April 28, 2023). "New Regency Adapting Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' Into Feature Film With John Hillcoat Directing". Deadline. Retrieved October 16, 2023.
66. Pearce, Leonard (December 30, 2024). "John Hillcoat Reveals Cormac McCarthy's "Faustian" Vision for Blood Meridian Film". The Film Stage. Retrieved January 2, 2025.
67. Jones, Josh (August 13, 2013). "Cormac McCarthy's Three Punctuation Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce". Open Culture. Archived from the original on May 20, 2020. Retrieved September 13, 2015.
68. Lincoln, Kenneth (2009). Cormac McCarthy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 14. ISBN 978-0-230-61967-8.
69. Crystal, David (2015). Making a Point: The Pernickity Story of English Punctuation. London: Profile Books. p. 92. ISBN 978-1-78125-350-2.
70. Hage, Erik (2010). Cormac McCarthy: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. p. 156. ISBN 978-0-7864-4310-9.
71. Greenwood, Willard P. (2009). Reading Cormac McCarthy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. p. 4. ISBN 978-0-313-35664-3.
72. Tetzeli, Rick (December 7, 2016). "A Short History Of The Most Important Economic Theory In Tech". Fast Company. Archived from the original on August 1, 2020. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
73. Flood, Alison (February 21, 2012). "Cormac McCarthy's parallel career revealed – as a scientific copy editor!". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 1, 2020. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
74. Crews, Michael Lynn (September 5, 2017). Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences. University of Texas Press. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-4773-1348-0.
75. ^ Woodward, Richard B. (April 19, 1992). "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 3, 2018. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
76. Bell, Vereen M. (Spring 1983). "The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy". Southern Literary Journal. 15 (2): 31–41. JSTOR 20077701.
77. "Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian". The A.V. Club. June 15, 2009. Archived from the original on November 5, 2013. Retrieved April 26, 2020.
78. Edwin T. Arnold; Dianne C. Luce (1999). "Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy". In Arnold, Edwin T. (ed.). Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-60473-650-2. Retrieved April 27, 2020 – via Project MUSE.
79. Mundik, Petra (2009). ""Striking the Fire Out of the Rock": Gnostic Theology in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian". South Central Review. 26 (3): 72–97. doi:10.1353/scr.0.0057. S2CID 144187406. Archived from the original on June 2, 2018. Retrieved April 27, 2020.
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81. Hwang, Jung-Suk (2018). "The Wild West, 9/11, and Mexicans in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men". Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 60 (3): 346–371. doi:10.7560/TSLL60304. S2CID 165691304.
82. "Cormac McCarthy Writer Class of December 1981". MacArthur Foundation. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved April 29, 2020.
83. "Cormac McCarthy: An American Philosophy". The Artifice. May 26, 2014. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved April 26, 2020.
84. ^ Herlihy-Mara, Jeffrey (2015). ""Mojado-Reverso" or, a Reverse Wetback: On John Grady Cole's Mexican Ancestry in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses". Modern Fiction Studies. 61 (3): 469–492. doi:10.1353/mfs.2015.0046. JSTOR 26421901. S2CID 159643410.
85. Soto, Isabel (January 1, 2002). "Chapter 4:The Border Paradigm in Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing.". In Benito, Jesús (ed.). Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands. Brill. pp. 51–61.
86. Sugg, Katherine (2001). "Multicultural masculinities and the border romance in John Sayles's Lone Star and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy". New Centennial Review. 1 (3): 117–154. doi:10.1353/ncr.2003.0071. S2CID 144132488.
87. ^ Cohen, Patricia (November 30, 2009). "No Country for Old Typewriters: A Well-Used One Heads to Auction". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 16, 2020.
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90. "News — Exhibition on McCarthy's Process". The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. September 10, 2014. Archived from the original on July 30, 2020.
91. Kennedy, Randy (December 4, 2009). "Cormac McCarthy's Typewriter Brings $254,500 at Auction". ArtsBeat. The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 10, 2009. Retrieved January 11, 2010.
92. Creamer, Matt (January 31, 2013). "An Unpublished Novelist's Week as Fake Cormac McCarthy". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on August 1, 2021. Retrieved August 2, 2021.
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97. Schaub, Michael (June 28, 2016). "Cormac McCarthy isn't dead. He's too tough to die". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on July 28, 2020. Retrieved April 29, 2020.
98. Knight, Lucy (November 20, 2024). "Cormac McCarthy had 16-year-old 'muse' when he was 42, Vanity Fair reports". The Guardian. Retrieved November 20, 2024.
99. "Why Don't Republicans Write Fiction?". March 6, 2007. Archived from the original on June 8, 2020. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
100. Holloway, David (2020). "North American Politics". In Fyre, Steven (ed.). Cormac McCarthy in Context. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 197–206. doi:10.1017/9781108772297.019. ISBN 978-1-108-77229-7. S2CID 234965059.
101. "A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men". Time. October 18, 2007. Archived from the original on February 28, 2017.
102. Goodwyn, Wade (June 13, 2023). "Cormac McCarthy, American novelist of the stark and dark, dies at 89". NPR. Archived from the original on June 14, 2023.
103. Coen, Susie (June 13, 2023). "Cormac McCarthy: Pulitzer Prize-winning US author dies aged 89". The Telegraph. Archived from the original on June 13, 2023.
104. Lorentzen, Christian (June 14, 2023). "Cormac McCarthy, writer, 1933–2023". Financial Times. Archived from the original on June 14, 2023.
105. Homberger, Eric (June 14, 2023). "Cormac McCarthy obituary". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 14, 2023.
106. Salam, Erum; Flood, Alison; Cain, Sian (June 14, 2023). "Cormac McCarthy, celebrated US novelist, dies aged 89". The Guardian. Archived from the original on June 14, 2023.
107. Bloom, Harold (September 24, 2003). "Dumbing down American readers". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on June 8, 2020 – via Boston.com.
108. Bloom, Harold (1994). "Appendix D: The Chaotic Age: A Canonical Prophecy". The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace & Company. pp. 548–567. ISBN 0-15-195747-9 – via the Internet Archive (registration required).
109. Pierce, Leonard (June 15, 2009). "Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on July 24, 2020.
110. "Cormac McCarthy Papers at The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX". thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu. Archived from the original on July 25, 2011. Retrieved August 25, 2011.
111. "Texas State acquires McCarthy archives". The Hollywood Reporter. Associated Press. January 15, 2008. Archived from the original on September 15, 2018. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
112. ^ "Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy : The Wittliff Collections: Texas State University". Thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu. September 21, 2016. Archived from the original on December 19, 2017. Retrieved November 29, 2017.
113. Archives, Critical History, Translation. (2020). In S. Frye (Ed.), Cormac McCarthy in Context (Literature in Context, pp. 271–342). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
114. Wood, James (July 18, 2005). "Red Planet". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 2, 2020.
115. ^ Alter, Alexandra (March 8, 2022). "Sixteen Years After 'The Road,' Cormac McCarthy Is Publishing Two New Novels". The New York Times. Retrieved March 9, 2022.

Further reading

• Online books
• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Online books
• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Frye, Steven (2009). Understanding Cormac McCarthy. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-839-6.
• Frye, Steven, ed. (2013). The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-64480-9.
• Luce, Dianne C. (Spring 2001). "Cormac McCarthy: A Bibliography". The Cormac McCarthy Journal. 1 (1). Miami: The Cormac McCarthy Society: 72–84. JSTOR 42909337. (Updated version published October 26, 2011.)
• "Connecting Science and Art". Science Friday. April 8, 2011. Retrieved May 25, 2015.

External links

Archives at
Location Wittliff collections  Identifiers Collection 091  Source Cormac McCarthy Papers
How to use archival material

• Media related to Cormac McCarthy at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related to Cormac McCarthy at Wikiquote
• The Cormac McCarthy Society Archived July 17, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
• Southwestern Writers Collection at the Wittliff Collections, Texas State University – Cormac McCarthy Papers
• Cormac McCarthy at IMDb
• Cormac McCarthy discography at Discogs
• Western American Literature Journal: Cormac McCarthy
• Couldn't Care Less. Cormac McCarthy in conversation with David Krakauer

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• Biography
• Novels
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• Rhode Island
• Tennessee
• United States

• Cormac McCarthy
• 1933 births
• 2023 deaths
• 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights
• 20th-century American male writers
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• Writers of Gothic fiction
• Writers of historical fiction set in the modern age
• Writers of historical mysteries
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