55 Facts About Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is known for his graphic depictions of violence and his unique writing style, recognizable by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution.

Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, although he was raised primarily in Tennessee.

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 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 dropped out of college in 1953 to join the United States Air Force.

In 1959 Cormac McCarthy dropped out of UTK for the final time and left for Chicago.

For purposes of his writing career, McCarthy changed his first name from Charles to Cormac to avoid confusion, and comparison, with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy.

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 1979, Cormac McCarthy published the semi-autobiographical 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 labelled 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 would expand 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 does not know any writers and much prefers 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 is a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems.

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 uses 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 prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, or a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons, which he has labelled as "idiocy".

Cormac McCarthy has done copy-editing work for physicists Lawrence M Krauss and Lisa Randall.

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

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

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

Since 1958, Cormac McCarthy has written all of his literary work and correspondence with a mechanical typewriter.

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, a Twitter account impersonating McCarthy was created by Scottish writer Michael Crossan, 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 respects only authors who "deal with issues of life and death", citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not.

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

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.