62 Facts About Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is widely regarded as one of the great American novelists.

Cormac McCarthy first experienced widespread success with All the Pretty Horses, for which he received both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Cormac McCarthy had a play adapted into a 2011 film, The Sunset Limited.

Cormac McCarthy worked with the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, where he published the essay "The Kekule Problem", which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language.

Cormac McCarthy was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012.

Cormac 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.

Cormac McCarthy described a moment when his teacher asked the class about their hobbies.

Cormac McCarthy became interested in writing after a professor asked him to repunctuate a collection of eighteenth-century essays for inclusion in a textbook.

Cormac McCarthy left college in 1953 to join the US Air Force.

In 1959, Cormac McCarthy dropped out of college and left for Chicago.

Cormac McCarthy had been a family nickname given to his father by his Irish aunts.

When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, Cormac McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack.

Cormac McCarthy 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.

When he traveled the country, Cormac McCarthy always carried a 100-watt bulb in his bag so he could read at night, no matter where he was sleeping.

In 1969, the couple moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a dairy barn, which Cormac McCarthy renovated, doing the stonework himself.

In 1976, Cormac McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas.

In 1974, Richard Pearce of PBS contacted Cormac McCarthy and asked him to write the screenplay for an episode of Visions, a television drama series.

Cormac McCarthy completed the screenplay in 1976 and the episode, titled The Gardener's Son, aired on January 6,1977.

In 1976, when Cormac McCarthy was 42, he met then-16-year-old Finnish-American Augusta Britt at a motel in Arizona.

In 1979, Cormac McCarthy published his semiautobiographical Suttree, which he had written over 20 years before, based on his experiences in Knoxville on the Tennessee River.

In 1981, Cormac McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship worth $236,000.

At the time, Cormac McCarthy was living in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center, which he described as "barely habitable".

Cormac McCarthy was labeled the "best unknown novelist in America".

Cormac McCarthy finally received widespread recognition following the publication of All the Pretty Horses, when it won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Cormac McCarthy originally conceived his next work, No Country for Old Men, as a screenplay before turning it into a novel.

Cormac McCarthy wrote two pages covering the idea; four years later in Ireland he expanded the idea into his tenth novel, The Road.

Many of the discussions between the two were verbatim conversations Cormac McCarthy had had with his son.

Cormac McCarthy did not accept the prize in person, instead sending Sonny Mehta in his place.

Cormac McCarthy later adapted it into a screenplay for a 2011 film, directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones, who starred opposite Samuel L Jackson.

Cormac McCarthy told Winfrey that he did not know any writers and much preferred the company of scientists.

Cormac McCarthy spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his son was the inspiration for The Road.

In 2012, Cormac McCarthy sold his original screenplay The Counselor to Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, and Steve Schwartz, who had previously produced the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road.

Cormac McCarthy was a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems.

Unlike most members of the SFI, Cormac McCarthy did not have a scientific background.

The unconscious, according to Cormac McCarthy, "is a machine for operating an animal" and "all animals have an unconscious".

Cormac McCarthy postulates that language is a purely human cultural creation and not a biologically determined phenomenon.

At the time of his death, Cormac 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.

Cormac McCarthy 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.

Cormac McCarthy used punctuation sparsely, even replacing most commas with "and" to create polysyndetons; it has been called "the most important word in Cormac McCarthy's lexicon".

Cormac McCarthy 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".

Cormac McCarthy did not use quotation marks for dialogue and believed there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks".

Cormac McCarthy copy edited work for physicists Lawrence M Krauss and Lisa Randall.

Cormac 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.

Katherine Sugg observes that Cormac McCarthy's writing is "often considered a 'multicultural' and 'bilingual' narrative practice, particularly for its abundant use of untranslated Spanish dialogue".

Cormac McCarthy dedicated himself to writing full time, choosing not to work other jobs to support his career.

Nevertheless, according to scholar Steve Davis, Cormac McCarthy had an "incredible work ethic".

Cormac McCarthy 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.

Cormac McCarthy was known to conduct exhaustive research on the historical settings and regional environments found in his fiction.

Cormac McCarthy edited his own writing, sometimes revising a book over the course of years or decades before deeming it fit for publication.

Cormac McCarthy originally used a Royal but went looking for a more lightweight machine ahead of a trip to Europe in the early 1960s.

Cormac McCarthy bought a portable Olivetti Lettera 32 for $50 at a Knoxville pawn shop and typed about five million words over the next five decades.

Cormac McCarthy maintained it by simply "blowing out the dust with a service station hose".

Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti was auctioned in December 2009 at Christie's, with the auction house estimating it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000.

Cormac McCarthy replaced it with an identical model, bought for him by his friend John Miller for $11 plus $19.95 for shipping.

In 2013, Scottish writer Michael Crossan created a Twitter account impersonating Cormac McCarthy, quickly amassing several thousand followers and recognition by former site owner Jack Dorsey.

Five hours after the account's creation, Cormac McCarthy's publisher confirmed that the account was fake and that Cormac McCarthy did not own a computer.

In 2016, a hoax spread on Twitter claiming that Cormac McCarthy had died, with USA Today even repeating the information.

In one of his few interviews, Cormac 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.

Socially, Cormac McCarthy had an aversion to other writers, preferring the company of scientists.

Cormac McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe on June 13,2023, at the age of 89.

Cormac McCarthy was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.

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.