Cormac McCarthy

Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. was born in Providence, one of six children, and moved at four to Knoxville, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority and the family took a house in Sequoyah Hills. We were considered rich, he said later, because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks. He served at the altar of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, saw no point in school, and bragged that he had every hobby there was and 40 or 50 to spare. He enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1951, quit for the Air Force in 1953, and spent four years in Alaska reading, which he said was the first real reading he had done.

Random House published The Orchard Keeper in 1965 and Albert Erskine, who had edited Faulkner, stayed with him for 20 years. What followed was four decades of prizes and no sales. A Rockefeller grant took him to Ibiza to write Outer Dark. He and his second wife lived in a Tennessee dairy barn, and later he worked in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center that he called barely habitable. A MacArthur Fellowship worth 236,000 dollars in 1981 paid for the Southwest research behind Blood Meridian in 1985. All the Pretty Horses sold 190,000 hardcovers in six months in 1992, after a career in which no book of his had passed 5,000. The Road took the Pulitzer in 2007. He wrote all of it on a 50-dollar Olivetti bought at a Knoxville pawn shop, about five million words.

In November 2024, 17 months after he died, Vanity Fair published an account of a relationship that had run 47 years. McCarthy met Augusta Britt in 1976 at an Arizona motel. He was 42. She was 16, living in a foster home, and had been moved through foster homes for five years. The magazine reported that in 1977, when she was 17, he forged her birth certificate and took her across the border into Mexico, and that Britt said the trip began after Erskine warned him the FBI wanted him for statutory rape and the Mann Act. Britt maintains throughout the piece that the relationship was neither predatory nor abusive. They stayed in contact until his death. He had already drawn on her for Suttree while he was still writing it.

He died at home in Santa Fe on June 13, 2023, at 89. What he left was mostly other people's words — a library of roughly 20,000 books, more than 2,000 of them annotated in his hand, and his papers at Texas State. The Olivetti went to Christie's in December 2009 and brought 254,500 dollars, which he gave to the Santa Fe Institute, where he was a trustee and preferred the company of physicists to novelists. Blood Meridian, received tepidly in 1985, is now taught as the American novel of violence, praised hardest by people who did not buy it when it was new. The Vanity Fair reporting landed on top of that, and the argument has not finished.

Cormac McCarthy's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Orchard Keeper book
  The debut, and winner of the William Faulkner Foundation Award 1965
• Suttree book
  Semi-autobiographical, written over 20 years out of his Knoxville life 1979
• Blood Meridian book
  Received tepidly, and now generally called his best 1985
• All the Pretty Horses book
  National Book Award. It sold 190,000 hardcovers in six months 1992
• No Country for Old Men book
  Written first as a screenplay 2005
• The Road book
  Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2007. His young son was the reason for it 2006

• 1937 aged ~4 The family moves from Providence to Knoxville His father took a job as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
• 1953 aged ~20 Leaves the University of Tennessee for the Air Force and Alaska He said the four years there were when he started reading in earnest.
• 1961 aged ~28 Marries Lee Holleman and moves into a shack with no heat or running water Their son Cullen was born the next year.
• 1965 aged ~32 Random House publishes The Orchard Keeper Albert Erskine, who had edited Faulkner, took him on and stayed 20 years.
• 1981 aged ~48 Wins a MacArthur Fellowship worth 236,000 dollars Saul Bellow and Shelby Foote were among those who put his name forward.
• 1985 aged ~52 Publishes Blood Meridian to a lukewarm reception He was living in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center.
• 1992 aged ~59 All the Pretty Horses sells 190,000 hardcovers in six months Nothing he had written before had sold more than 5,000 in hardcover.
• June 5, 2007 aged 73 Gives his first television interview, to Oprah Winfrey, in the Santa Fe Institute library He told her he did not know any writers and preferred scientists. The Road took the Pulitzer that year.
• June 13, 2023 aged 89 Dies at home in Santa Fe at 89 The Passenger and Stella Maris had come out the previous autumn.

• William Faulkner 1897–1962
  Nobel laureate whose stream-of-consciousness novels set in Yoknapatawpha County reshaped American fiction. shared his editor, Albert Erskine
• Saul Bellow 1915–2005
  Novelist whose intellectually rich fiction explored individuality, urban life, and the immigrant experience in modern America. recommended him for the MacArthur
• Oprah Winfrey b. 1954
  Media executive and talk show host who built a multimedia empire and became one of the most influential women in the world. drew him into his only television interview
• Murray Gell-Mann 1929–2019
  Theoretical physicist who discovered quarks and won the Nobel Prize for his standard model of particle physics. the physicist he sought out instead of writers
• Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose spare prose style defined 20th-century American fiction. the comparison reviewers reached for