The Modern Novel

Biography

Cormac McCarthy was actually born in Rhode Island (in 1933) and not out West, as Charles McCarthy. He changed his named to Cormac after the Irish king. His family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, when he was four. He attended the University of Tennessee and then joined the Air Force for four years. After leaving the Air Force, he returned to university where he started writing short stories and met and married Lee Holleman (as Lee McCarthy she was a published poet, who died in 2009). They had a son, Cullen. McCarthy did not take a degree and the family moved to Chicago where McCarthy worked as an auto mechanic. They returned to Tennessee where the marriage broke up. While on a travelling fellowship to Ireland, he met an English singer/dancer, Anne DeLisle, and they were married in 1966. By this time, he had published some of his early work and was having some success. They returned to Tennessee after living in Europe and were separated in 1976, with McCarthy moving to El Paso, where he still lives. It wasn’t till the publication of Blood Meridian that McCarthy had any real success and only with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, the first in the Border Trilogy, did he become well known. He has since produced a stunning collection of novels, every one essential reading and every one as good as or, in many cases, superior, to anything else being written in the United States. He died in 2023.

Other links

His official website
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction
Cormac McCarthy: America’s great poetic visionary
Featured Author: Cormac McCarthy
Overrated Writers, Part Four: Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Lethem
A conversation between author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men
Interview