Cormac McCarthy

Born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, the third of six children of a prominent lawyer, McCarthy grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family moved when he was four. He entered the University of Tennessee, dropped out to join the Air Force for four years, returned but never finished, and changed his first name from Charles to Cormac, after an Irish king. His early Appalachian novels, The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), earned almost no readers and less money. He lived for years in a barn outside Knoxville, then in a stone cottage he built by hand. A MacArthur Fellowship in 1981 gave him enough to move to El Paso, Texas, where the desert transformed his prose. Blood Meridian (1985), a hallucinatory epic of scalp hunters on the Mexican border, was largely ignored on publication but is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American novels. The Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), finally brought him popular success. No Country for Old Men (2005) became an Academy Award-winning Coen Brothers film. The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize. He gave one television interview in his life, to Oprah Winfrey in 2007, and died in Santa Fe on June 13, 2023, at eighty-nine.

In 2009, McCarthy sent the manual Olivetti Lettera 32 he had typed every book on since a Knoxville pawnshop sale for fifty dollars to Christie's, where it sold for two hundred fifty-four thousand five hundred dollars. He spent the money on an identical replacement, purchased for eleven dollars plus shipping.