Cormac McCarthy

At 90 years old, Cormac McCarthy has this physical status:

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy, 1933) is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter.

He has written ten books, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres. Blood Meridian (1985), McCarthy's fifth book since 1923, was included on Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. He also received both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.

No Country for Old Men, a 2005 film based on the same name, received four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God's animations have been converted into motion pictures, while Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute video. McCarthy received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006).

The Road appeared first on the Times' list of the top 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past ten years in 2010.

McCarthy, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth, rated Blood Meridian as one of the four leading American novelists of his day, and Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" is one of the best single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.

Life

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933, one of six children of Gladys Christina McGrail and Charles Joseph McCarthy. His family were Irish Catholics. The family migrated from Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father served as a prosecutor for the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1937. The family first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941, they had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville. "We were considered wealthy because all the people around us were living in one or two-room shacks," McCarthy would later explain. Jim Long (1930–2012), who would later be described as J-Bone in Suttree, was one of his childhood friends.

McCarthy attended Parochial School and Knoxville Catholic High School, as an altar child at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Knoxville. McCarthy saw no point in education as a student, preferring to pursue his own interests. He recalled a time when his teacher asked the students to discuss their interests. McCarthy erupted as he later said, "I was the only one with any hobbies and I had every interest in existence," he later revealed. No matter how esoteric, McCarthy answered ecstatically. I could have made everyone a hobby but still had 40 or 50 to take home."

He began attending the University of Tennessee (UTK), but he dropped out in 1953 to join the United States Air Force. McCarthy enjoyed reading books voraciously while stationed in Alaska, which he claimed to be the first time he had done so. In 1957, he returned to UTK, where he wrote under the name C. J. McCarthy, Jr., in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, where he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. But, in 1959, he dropped out of UTK for the final time and headed for Chicago.

McCarthy changed Charles to Cormac to avoid confusion and comparison with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy for purposes of his writing career. Cormac had been given a family name by his Irish aunts for his father. According to other reports, he changed his name to honor Irish chieftain Cormac MacCarthy, who designed Blarney Castle.

McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the Smoky Mountains north of Knoxville" after marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961. In 1962, the couple had Cullen's son, Cullen. McCarthy sewed fireplaces into his Sevier County shack when writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville this year. Though Lee was worried about the baby and tending to the house's chores, Cormac begged her to work a day job so he could concentrate on his novel writing. She left Wyoming, where she applied for divorce and landed her first teaching job, dissatisfied with the situation.

In 1965, Random House published McCarthy's first book, The Orchard Keeper. He had finished the book when working part-time at a Chicago auto-parts warehouse and sent the manuscript "blindly" to Albert Erskine of Random House. McCarthy's work was edited for the next 20 years by Erskine. Critics praised McCarthy's striking use of imagery on its debut and lauded the similarity to Faulkner's work. The Orchard Keeper received the inaugural William Faulkner Foundation Award in 1966 for his first book.

McCarthy was kicked out of a $40-a-month apartment for failing to pay his rent while living in New Orleans' French Quarter. McCarthy used to carry a 100-watt bulb in his bag so he could read at night, no matter where he was sleeping.

McCarthy sailed out on the liner Sylvania in 1965, wishing to visit Ireland for the first time. Anne DeLisle, who was serving on the ship as a dancer and singer, was on board the ship. They were married in England in 1966. He received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1966, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before settling in Ibiza, where he wrote his second book, Outer Dark (1968). After his return to the United States with his partner, Outer Darkness was published to generally favorable reviews.

The couple bought a dairy barn in Louisville, Tennessee, which McCarthy restored, doing the stonework by hand. According to DeLisle, the couple lived in "total poverty" after bathing in a lake. "Someone will call up and invite him to speak at a university about his books," DeLisle said. He'd tell them that everything they needed to hear was on the website. So we'll be eating beans for another week." When living in the barn, he wrote his next book, Child of God (1973). Child of God was established in southern Appalachia, like Outer Dark before it. McCarthy married Anne DeLisle in 1976 and moved to El Paso, Texas.

Richard Pearce of PBS called McCarthy in 1974 and asked him to write the screenplay for an episode of Visions, a television drama series. McCarthy and McCarthy spent a year in South Carolina researching industrialization, 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 completed the screenplay in 1976, and the episode titled The Gardener's Son aired on January 6, 1977. Several film festivals around the world featured it. In 1977, the episode was nominated for two primetime Emmy awards.

McCarthy wrote the semi-autobiographical Suttree, which he had written over 20 years in Knoxville on the Tennessee River in 1979. Jerome Charyn likened it to a doomed Huckleberry Finn.

McCarthy received a MacArthur Fellowship worth $236,000. Saul Bellow, Shelby Foote, and others had recommended him to the company. Since he was able to travel to the South-West, he could study his next book, The Evening Redness of the West (1985). The book is well-known for its violence, with The New York Times naming it the "most book since the Iliad." Despite being initially dismissed by some commentators, the book has risen in prominence in literary circles; Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian "the best single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying." Blood Meridian came third in a 2006 survey of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to identify the top American novels of the last quarter-century, behind Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Some have even suggested that it be the Great American Novel. Time included it on their 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. McCarthy was living in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center that he described as "barely habitable."

None of McCarthy's books had more than 5,000 hardcover copies as of 1991, and "for the majority of his career, he didn't have an agent." He was dubbed America's most "unknown novelist."

Albert Erskine retired from Random House after 20 years with McCarthy. McCarthy went to Alfred A. Knopf, where he fell under Gary Fisketjon's editorial guidance. McCarthy opted for his first-ever interview with Richard B. Woodward of The New York Times as a final favour to Erskine.

Following the publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), McCarthy's achievement was widely praised, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. It became a New York Times bestseller, with 190,000 hardcover copies in fewer than six months. The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), which were both followed by the Border Trilogy. The Stonemason, his second dramatic work in the midst of this trilogy, appeared in 1995.

McCarthy wrote No Country for Old Men (2005) as a screenplay before converting it into a novel. In addition, the book has no description of the setting and is largely made of dialogue. The Coen brothers converted No Country for Old Men, a western set in the 1980s, into a 2007 film of the same name, which received four Academy Awards and more than 75 worldwide awards.

McCarthy imagined the city in a hundred years: "fires up on the hill, and everything being laid to waste" while sleeping at an El Paso motel with his son. He wrote two pages about the concept, but four years later in Ireland, he'll expand the concept to his tenth book, The Road. It follows a lone father and his young son's tour of a post-apocalyptic America hunted by cannibals. Both of the talks were based on verbatim conversations between McCarthy and his son. It was launched in 2006 and received international recognition and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. McCarthy did not accept the prize in person, but instead sent Sonny Mehta in his place. John Hillcoat wrote and directed the 2009 film version, written by Joe Penhall and starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Roger Ebert's review of the "devastating book" was mostly positive, although Peter Bradshaw called it "a safe change of emphasis," but Dan Jolin found it to be a "faithful retelling" of the "devastating book."

In 2006, McCarthy published The Sunset Limited. It was unorthodox and may have more in common with a book, hence McCarthy's description: "A novel in dramatic form." He later turned it into a screenplay for a 2011 film directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones, who also appeared opposite Samuel L. Jackson in The Road. McCarthy opted for his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the Santa Fe Institute's library. McCarthy told Winfrey that he does not know any writers and that he much prefers the company of scientists. During the interview, he related to several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he suffered at times during his writing career. He also talked about the challenges of raising a child at an early age and how his son inspired The Road.

McCarthy sold his original screenplay The Counselor to Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, and Steve Schwartz, who had previously produced McCarthy's film version. Ridley Scott, the production's director, concluded in 2012. It was announced on October 25, 2013 at a polarized critical reception. It's "dated naff"; Rolling Stone's Peter Travers described it as a "droning meditation on capitalism," according to Mark Kermode of The New York Times; however, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times found it "terrifying" and "seductive."

McCarthy is a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a multidisciplinary research center dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems. McCarthy does not have a scientific background, unlike most of the SFI. "There isn't any place like the Santa Fe Institute," Murray Gell-Mann said, and there isn't any writer like Cormac, so the two work well together." McCarthy's first piece of nonfiction writing in his 50-year writing career resulted from his time at the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy discusses a dream of August Kekulé's as a model of the unconscious mind and a source of language in his essay "The Kekulé Problem" (2016). He inquires into the unconscious mind's existence and how it is distinguished from human language. According to McCarthy, "the unconscious is a device for controlling an animal" and "all animals have an unconscious." McCarthy argues that language is purely human cultural creation, not a biologically determined phenomenon.

McCarthy's newest book, The Passenger, was announced at a multimedia function hosted by the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe in 2015. The book was inspired by his time as a scientist; SFI biologist David Krakauer has described it as "fully blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] investigative novel." The New York Times announced in March 2022 that The Passenger and Stella Maris, a second companion book, would be published on October 25, 2022, and Stella Maris, a second companion book, announced on September 22. Stella Maris will be McCarthy's first book since Outer Darkness to include a female protagonist.

Personal life and views

McCarthy is a teetotaler. "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore," Richard B. Woodward says; he quit 16 years ago [i.e. Suttree's book describes how one of his teenage girlfriends was in El Paso in 1976, and it reads like a farewell to that life. 'It's just those who stop drinking,' he says. It's drinking that's hazard to writing,'" a writer says.

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

Michael Crossan, a Scottish writer, launched a Twitter account impersonating McCarthy (@CormacCMcCarthy), amassing many thousand followers and admiration by site owner Jack Dorsey in 2013. McCarthy's publisher informed McCarthy that the account was fake and that McCarthy did not have a computer five hours after it was opened. McCarthy's (@CormacMcCrthy) account was established in 2018. Following a viral tweet, the account was briefly verified in 2021, after which his agent reported that it was fake.

McCarthy died on Twitter in 2016, and USA Today even repeated the story. "Cormac McCarthy isn't dead," the Los Angeles Times said in response to the libelry. He's too heavy to die.

McCarthy has not stated his political views out openly. "If you don't agree with them politically, you can't just agree to disagree," a Santa Fe resident with a traditionalist outlook has expressed his dissatisfaction with their liberalism and lifestyle: "They think you're mad." McCarthy and Edward Abbey considered covertly releasing wolves into southern Arizona to restore their decimated population.

McCarthy said in one of his few interviews, he admires only writers who "deal with issues of life and death," quoting Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not. "I don't know" about them, but that isn't literature to me." "I find it strange" that a large number of writers who are considered exemplary, according to him. McCarthy said he is "not a fan of any of the Latin American writers, magical realism" when writing novels. You know, it's impossible to convince people that it's impossible to do without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible." Moby-Dick (1851) has been his most popular book, according to him.

McCarthy has a resentment against other writers, preferring scientists over scientists. "What physicists achieved in the twentieth century was one of the most extraordinary flowerings ever in human history," he has expressed his admiration for scientific advancements. McCarthy has often shunned his colleagues to fraternize instead with scientists such as physicist Murray Gell-Mann and whale biologist Roger Payne at MacArthur's reunions. "Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list," McCarthy said of all of his pursuits.

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