CORMAC McCARTHY

A revealing biography of the enigmatic Southwest literary sage.

After his death in 2023, McCarthy was honored as the author of multiple classics, most famously 1985’s death-soaked Western Blood Meridian and 2006’s apocalyptic tale The Road. Those bleak novels, combined with his infamous reclusiveness, led many to assume he kept a monk-like existence. But biographer Daugherty (Larry McMurtry: A Life, 2023, etc.) uncovers a sociable Southerner prone to carousing. Raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, McCarthy was exposed to rural poverty from a young age, experiences that fueled his early fiction. Nakedly influenced by Melville and Faulkner, he submitted his first novel, 1965’s The Orchard Keeper, unsolicited to Random House and was all but miraculously rescued from the slush pile by Faulkner’s editor. The good fortune ended there for a long time; his books sold poorly for decades. But a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1981 liberated him, and, in El Paso and later Santa Fe, he made the Southwest his muse. Women were muses, too, awkwardly and uncomfortably: He was neglectful toward his three wives, and his most enduring relationship was with a woman named Augusta Britt, whom he met when she was 16. Daugherty balances the elements of McCarthy’s peculiar genius with well-reported portraits of him as a private yet adventurous figure. Disinterested in the literary world, he used his MacArthur fellowship as a way to meet scientists instead: Fittingly for this most Melvillean of modern authors, he went on whale-watching trips with one expert and spent his later years at the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific think tank. His final years were messy—editors found his final novels sloppy, the institute was entangled with Jeffrey Epstein, and news of his relationship with Britt clouded his posthumous reputation. Daugherty doesn’t neglect these flaws but puts them in the context of a writer who took nobody’s direction.

A well-told story of a flinty American figure.