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A Guide to the Cormac McCarthy Papers, 1964-2007
Collection 091
Descriptive Summary
Creator: Cormac McCarthy
Title: The Cormac McCarthy Papers
Dates: 1964-2007
Abstract: The Cormac McCarthy Papers span 1964-2007 and document the literary career of one of America’s most celebrated authors. The collection is arranged in two series: Published Works and Unpublished Works. The bulk of the collection is Published Works. Novels and produced plays and screenplays represented include: The Orchard Keeper; Outer Dark; Child of God; The Gardener’s Son; Suttree; Blood Meridian; All the Pretty Horses; The Crossing; The Stonemason; Cities of the Plain; No Country for Old Men; the Road; and The Sunset Limited. Unpublished Works include the screenplay, “Whales and Men,” and an unfinished novel “The Passenger.” NOTE: Access to "The Passenger" is restricted until after the novel is published.
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and playwright, Cormac McCarthy, was born Charles McCarthy, Jr., on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. He was the third of six children born to Charles and Gladys McCarthy, preceded by sisters Jackie and Bobbie, and followed by Bill, Maryellen, and Dennis. In 1937, his parents moved the family to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father was employed as a lawyer with the Tennessee Valley Authority.
McCarthy spent much of his life in Tennessee, and his early works are clearly influenced by that region. His first four published novels, The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree (1979), reflect the culture, myth and character of East Tennessee and Appalachia.
McCarthy briefly attended The University of Tennessee (UT) from 1951 to 1952 before serving four years in the U.S. Air Force, including two years in Alaska where he hosted a radio program. In 1957, he returned to UT where he published the short stories “A Drowning Incident” and “Wake for Susan” in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix. His literary talent did not go unrecognized at UT, and McCarthy received the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960, firsts in a long list of literary accolades to come.
In 1960, McCarthy left UT without his degree and moved to Chicago where he worked part time in an auto parts warehouse and pursued his writing. He married poet and former UT student, Lee Holleman; the couple had one son, Cullen. In 1961, they moved to Sevier County, Tennessee, where the marriage ended in divorce in 1962. McCarthy left Tennessee again, this time moving to Asheville, North Carolina, and then New Orleans where he continued work on his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Set in rural Tennessee between the two world wars, it is the story of a boy, John Wesley Rattner, and the bootlegger, Marion Slyder, who has killed the boy’s father.
McCarthy has notably kept his distance from reporters, but in 1992 he granted Richard Woodward a rare interview published in The New York Times Magazine. In that interview, he confessed that he sent the manuscript for The Orchard Keeper to Random House because, “it was the only publisher I had heard of.” At Random House, McCarthy was paired with renowned editor, Albert Erskine, who had worked with literary giants such as Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. McCarthy’s Southern Gothic novels continue to be compared with those of the latter, and McCarthy’s debut novel earned him the William Faulkner Foundation Award in 1965. Erskine remained McCarthy’s editor for over twenty years - until his retirement in the mid 1980s. Blood Meridian (1985) was their final collaboration.
In the same year The Orchard Keeper was published, McCarthy received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship, and he used the funds to go to Ireland. En route on the ocean liner, Sylvania, he met English dancer and singer, Anne De Lisle, and the two were married in England in 1966. A Rockefeller Foundation grant McCarthy received that same year supported the couple as they traveled through Europe and lived briefly on the Spanish island of Ibiza where McCarthy began work on his second novel, Outer Dark. They eventually moved to Tennessee, settling in Rockford, near Knoxville.
Outer Dark was published in 1968. It tells the story of brother and sister, Culla and Rinthy Holme, who have a child together. Culla claims the child has died, and leaves to search for paying work. Rinthy then searches for her “littlest chap.” Like McCarthy’s debut novel, Outer Dark was a critical, if not popular, success. The selection committee for the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation agreed with the critics, and McCarthy was awarded a Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1969.
McCarthy’s third novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. The story of the isolated mass murderer and necrophile, Lester Ballard, is loosely based on an historical figure in Sevier County, Tennessee. Like his previous works, Child of God could not be considered a commercial success, but a steady following of devoted readers and critics grew.
Following Child of God, McCarthy departed from the novel format to write the script for The Gardener’s Son, an episode in the PBS series, Visions. It first aired January 6, 1977 and starred Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, and Kevin Conway as members of two feuding South Carolina families, the wealthy Greggs, and the blue-collar McEvoys.
Suttree, McCarthy’s fourth novel, was published in 1979. Written over the span of twenty years, the semi-autobiographical novel set in the early 1950s follows Cornelius Suttree, a fisherman on the Tennessee River who lives on the fringe of society after severing ties with his family and abandoning his wife and son. Many of the characters are reflections of people that McCarthy knew in Knoxville and the surrounding area.
By the time Suttree was published, McCarthy was living in El Paso, Texas. He had separated from De Lisle in 1976, and the two divorced in 1978. In 1981, McCarthy won a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as a “genius grant.” The five-year grant provides recipients with “flexibility to pursue their creative activities in the absence of specific obligations or reporting requirements,” and it allowed McCarthy to concentrate on his next writing project.
McCarthy’s move to the southwest brought a shift in the settings of his novels. He began work on what he termed his “western,” which was published in 1985 as Blood Meridian. In his 1992 interview with Woodward, McCarthy states, “I’ve always been interested in the Southwest. There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.” In Blood Meridian, McCarthytackled the myth of the West head-on with his mid-nineteenth century border story of “the kid” and a band of American mercenaries hired to kill and scalp Indians in Mexico. The novel firmly thrust McCarthy into the center of the American literary canon. Critic Harold Bloom declared Blood Meridian, “the authentic American apocalyptic novel,” stating, “The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable.”
McCarthy followed Blood Meridian with three novels set on the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-twentieth century, and which reveal the dreams and coming-of-age of two remarkable characters, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998), known collectively as “The Border Trilogy,” were McCarthy’s first novels published after Erskine’s retirement and McCarthy’s move from Random House to Knopf. They also mark another significant shift in McCarthy’s career -- for the first time, his novels were bestsellers.
McCarthy continued to receive praise from critics; All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award in 1992 and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993. And he received personal accolades with his induction into the El Paso Herald-Post Hall of Fame in 1991 and his reception of the Texas Institute of Letters Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. In 2000, All the Pretty Horses was released as a film directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon as John Grady Cole. Ted Tally wrote the screenplay.
While McCarthy is best known for his novel writing, he has also written in other formats. The Stonemason, a play about an African-American family in Louisville, Kentucky that he wrote in the 1970s was revised and published by Ecco Press in 1994. And in 2006, Sunset Limited, a novel in dramatic form originally performed by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, was published in paperback by Vintage Books.
McCarthy initially began No Country for Old Men as a screenplay in the 1980s, but he eventually abandoned the format. Instead, the suspenseful story of sociopathic killer Anton Chiguhr’s pursuit of Llewelyn Moss was published in 2005 as his ninth novel. Ethan and Joel Coen adapted it for film in 2007, starring Javier Bardem as Chiguhr, Josh Brolin as Moss, and Tommy Lee Jones as sheriff Ed Tom Bell. In interviews supporting the film’s release, the Coen brothers joked that in adapting the novel for the screen, one of them simply held the book open while the other typed. The film won four Academy Awards, including best picture, and best screenplay adaptation.
McCarthy’s tenth novel, The Road, was published in 2006. The post-apocalyptic story of a father and son’s journey across a ruined landscape was dedicated to his son John Francis, from his third marriage to Jennifer Winkley. The novel won McCarthy the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the United Kingdom’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. In March 2007, Oprah Winfrey selected The Road as a reading for her popular book club, and the reclusive McCarthy made his first televised interview on her show that year.
In his later years, McCarthy resided in the Santa Fe, New Mexico area, where he enjoyed an affiliation with the multi-disciplinary Santa Fe Institute while continuing to write. He published two novels in 2022: The Passenger and Stella Maris. He died on June 13, 2023 at age 89.
Coles, Robert. “The Empty Road.” The New Yorker. March 22, 1969.
Coles, Robert. “The Stranger.” The New Yorker. August 26, 1974,
McGrath, Charles. “Lone Rider.” The New Yorker. June 27/July 4, 1994.
Wood, James. “Red Planet.” The New Yorker. July 25, 2005.
Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” The New York Times Magazine. April 19, 1992.
Scope and Contents Note:
The Cormac McCarthy Papers span 1964-2007 and document the literary career of one of America’s most celebrated authors. The collection is arranged in two series: Published Works and Unpublished Works. The bulk of the collection is Published Works, housed in boxes 1 through 96. All of McCarthy’s published novels and produced plays and screenplays are represented: The Orchard Keeper (boxes 1-7); Outer Dark (boxes 8-15); Child of God (boxes 16-17); The Gardener’s Son (box 18); Suttree (boxes 19-34); Blood Meridian (boxes 35-45); All the Pretty Horses (boxes 46-54); The Crossing (boxes 55-65); The Stonemason (boxes 66-68); Cities of the Plain (boxes 69-78); No Country for Old Men (boxes 79-86); The Road (boxes 87-93); and The Sunset Limited (boxes 94-96).
The works are arranged chronologically by publication/production date. The material for each title is arranged into the following subseries: correspondence; research; notes; drafts; fragments; proofs; and production materials. Not every title has material from each subseries. For example, there is no correspondence associated with Outer Dark or Child of God; and The Gardener’s Son is the only title with a subseries devoted to research. Other titles such as Blood Meridian have some research materials within the “notes” subseries.
Drafts represent the bulk of material for each title and are arranged chronologically as best determined. All pages of each draft remain in the original order, and pagination lists exist for each, representing McCarthy’s unique page-numbering practice -- particularly for early and revised drafts. Nearly every draft arrived at the Wittliff Collections with a numbered cover sheet that includes descriptive information such as title, draft stage, and page numbers.
These sheets remain with the materials, although the listed page number counts are often inaccurate. The true count and pagination can be found in the container list of this finding aid.
The second series, Unpublished Works, contains drafts for McCarthy’s unproduced screenplay, “Whales and Men,” (box 97) and a novel with the working title “The Passenger” (box 98). McCarthy began both Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men as screenplays, and although his scripts were never produced, the notes and drafts for them are housed in the boxes with the published novels of the same titles.
The Orchard Keeper …................................................................................ 1 - 7
Outer Dark ………………………………………………………………... 8 - 15
Child of God ………………………………………………………………. 16 - 17
The Gardener’s Son ………………………………………………………. 18
Suttree …………………………………………………………………….. 19 - 34
Blood Meridian ……………………………………………………………. 35 - 45
All the Pretty Horses ………………………………………………………. 46 - 54
The Crossing ………………………………………………………………. 55 - 65
The Stonemason, a Play …………………………………………………… 66 - 68
Cities of the Plain [screenplay] ……………………………………………. 69 - 70
Cities of the Plain [novel] …………………………………………………. 71 - 78
No Country for Old Men [screenplay] …………………………………….. 79
No Country for Old Men [novel] …………………………………………. 80 - 86
The Road ………………………………………………………………….. 87 - 93
Sunset Limited ……………………………………………………………... 94 - 96
“Whales and Men” ………………………………………………………… 97
“The Passenger”………....……………………………………………… 98
Terminology Notes:
• ALS Autograph [handwritten] Letter Signed (AL = Autograph Letter) • ANS Autograph [handwritten] Note Signed (AN = Autograph Note) • Galleys Proof printed on long sheets of normal page width • Holograph Handwritten • Leaf A sheet of paper • Printout A document printed from a computer • Setting Copy Copy of manuscript with typesetter’s markings • TLS Typed Letter Signed (TL = Typed Letter) • TNS Typed Note Signed (TN = Typed Note) • Typescript A document produced using a typewriter
Cormac McCarthy Papers, The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University-San Marcos
Acquisition Information
Purchased in 2007.
Processing Information
Processed by Katie Salzmann, 2009.
Note to Researchers
The Wittliff Collections holds several additional McCarthy-related collections:
• The Woolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, which consists of letters between McCarthy and bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer. The Woolmer Collection also includes 140 books and other published materials related to McCarthy. Many are signed and inscribed by the author
• The John Sepich Papers include research, correspondence and drafts of works of commentary by John Sepich focusing on the novel, Blood Meridian. Sepich published Notes on Blood Meridian in October, 1993. A revised and expanded edition of Notes on Blood Meridian was published by the University of Texas Press as part of the Southwestern Writers Collection/The Wittliff Collections Book Series in 2008.
• The Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy Collection is comprised of drafts and proofs of essays by various authors on the works of Cormac McCarthy. The essays were edited by Edwin "Chip" Arnold and Dianne Luce and appeared in Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, published in 1993.
• McCarthy's Drafts of two screenplays: "Whales and Men," and "Cities of the Plain," along with a typescript for McCarthy's stage play "The Stonemason." Donated by Cormac McCarthy and Bill and Sally Wittliff.
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