CormacMcCarthy (born CharlesMcCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist andplaywright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He has also writtenplays and screenplays. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait BlackMemorial Prize for Fiction for TheRoad. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adaptedas a 2007 film of the same name, whichwon four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He received a National Book Award and National Book CriticsCircle Award for his 1992 novel, All the Pretty Horses.All the Pretty Horses andThe Road were also made into major motionfilms.
Hisprevious novel, Blood Meridian, (1985) was amongTime magazine's list of 100 bestEnglish-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and placedjoint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the bestAmerican fiction published in the last 25 years Literary criticHarold Bloom named him as one of the four majorAmerican novelists of his time, alongside DonDeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian"the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying" In 2010The Times ranked The Road first on itslist of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10years. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner. McCarthy has beenincreasingly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize inLiterature.
McCarthy's firstnovel, The Orchard Keeper, waspublished by Random House in 1965. He decided to sendthe manuscript to Random House because "it was the only publisher[he] had heard of". At Random House, the manuscript found its wayto Albert Erskine, who had been William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner'sdeath in 1962. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy's work for thenext twenty years.
In thesummer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard theliner Sylvania, hoping to visit Ireland. While on the ship,he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. In1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy receiveda Rockefeller Foundation Grant,which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, wherehe wrote his second novel, OuterDark. Afterward he returned to America with his wife, andOuter Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorablereviews.
In1969, McCarthy and his wife moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased abarn, which McCarthy renovated, even doing the stoneworkhimself. Here he wrote his next book, Child of God, based on actual events.Child of God was published in 1973. Like Outer Darkbefore it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from AnneDeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979, his novel Suttree, which he had been writing on and off fortwenty years, was finally published.
Supporting himselfwith the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, he wrote hisnext novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in theWest, which was published in 1985. The book has grownappreciably in stature in literary circles. In a 2006 poll ofauthors and publishers conducted by The New York TimesMagazine to list the greatest American novels of the previousquarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind onlyToni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld.
McCarthy finallyreceived widespread recognition in 1992 with the publication ofAll the Pretty Horses,which won the National Book Award and the National Book CriticsCircle Award. It was followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, completing theBorder Trilogy. In the midst of thistrilogy came The Stonemason, McCarthy's second dramaticwork. He had previously written a film for PBS in the1970s, The Gardener's Son. McCarthy'snext book, 2005's No Country for Old Men, stayedwith the western setting and themes, yet moved to a morecontemporary period. It was adapted into a film of the same name by theCoen Brothers, winning four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awardsglobally. McCarthy's book, TheRoad (2006) won international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for literature. A film adaptation (2009) was directed byJohn Hillcoat, written by JoePenhall, and starred Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Also in 2006, McCarthypublished the play The Sunset Limited.
McCarthy is at work onthree new novels. One is set in 1980s NewOrleans and follows a young man as he deals with the suicide ofhis sister. According to McCarthy, this will be his first work tofeature a prominent female character. He also states that the newnovel is "long".
Thecomprehensive archive of Cormac McCarthy's personal papers ispreserved at the Wittliff collections, Texas State University, San Marcos,Texas. The McCarthy papers consists of 98 boxes (46 linearfeet). The acquisition of the Cormac McCarthy Papers resulted from yearsof ongoing conversations between McCarthy and Southwestern WritersCollection founder, Bill Wittliff, who negotiated the proceedings.The Southwestern Writers Collection / Wittliff collections also holds TheWolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, which consists of lettersbetween McCarthy and bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer, and fourother related collections.
McCarthy attended theUniversity of Tennessee from1951–52 and 1957–59 but never graduated. While at UT he publishedtwo stories in The Phoenix and was awarded theIngram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and1960.
McCarthy now lives inthe Tesuque, New Mexico, area, north ofSanta Fe, with his wife, JenniferWinkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy. In one of hisfew interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy revealsthat he is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues oflife and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understandthem," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers whoare considered good I consider strange."[8]McCarthy remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe andspends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded byhis friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
Talkshow host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novelThe Road as the April 2007 selection for herBook Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed tohis first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5,2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa FeInstitute; McCarthy told Winfrey that he does not know any writers,and much prefers the company of scientists. During the interview herelated several stories illustrating the degree of outright povertyhe has endured at times during his career as a writer. He alsospoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age,and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for TheRoad. McCarthy noted to Oprah that he prefers "simpledeclarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods,an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never asemicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue andbelieves there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird littlemarks".
According toWired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put upfor auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has beenin his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machinefor $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthyestimates he has typed around five million words on the machine,and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a servicestation hose". The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4,2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetchbetween $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500. The Olivetti'sreplacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought byMcCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11. The proceeds of the auctionare to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific researchorganization.