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84-454: Cormac McCarthy (born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. ; July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023) was an American author who wrote twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western , postapocalyptic , and Southern Gothic genres. His works often include graphic depictions of violence, and his writing style is characterised by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. He

168-506: A Rockefeller Foundation grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza , where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Afterward, he returned to the United States with his wife, where Outer Dark was published to generally favorable reviews. In 1969, the couple moved to Louisville, Tennessee , and purchased a dairy barn, which McCarthy renovated, doing

252-427: A " subconscious process" which should be given space for spontaneous inspiration. After 1958, McCarthy wrote all of his literary work and correspondence with a mechanical typewriter . He originally used a Royal but went looking for a more lightweight machine ahead of a trip to Europe in the early 1960s. He bought a portable Olivetti Lettera 32 for $ 50 at a Knoxville pawn shop and typed about five million words over

336-454: A "faithful adaptation" of the "devastating novel". McCarthy published the play The Sunset Limited in 2006. Critics noted it was unorthodox and may have had more in common with a novel, hence McCarthy's subtitle: "a novel in dramatic form". He later adapted it into a screenplay for a 2011 film , directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones , who also starred opposite Samuel L. Jackson . Oprah Winfrey selected McCarthy's The Road as

420-483: A 100-watt bulb in his bag so he could read at night, no matter where he was sleeping. In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters , McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania hoping to visit Ireland. On the ship, he met Englishwoman Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a dancer and singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, he received

504-495: A 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind Toni Morrison 's Beloved (1987) and Don DeLillo 's Underworld (1997). Some have even suggested it is the Great American Novel . Time included it on their 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. At

588-442: A Twitter account impersonating McCarthy, quickly amassing several thousand followers and recognition by former site owner Jack Dorsey . Five hours after the account's creation, McCarthy's publisher confirmed that the account was fake and that McCarthy did not own a computer. In 2018, another account impersonating McCarthy was created. In 2021, it was briefly marked verified following a viral tweet, after which his agent confirmed that

672-421: A colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons, which he labeled as "idiocy". He did not use quotation marks for dialogue and believed there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks". Erik Hage notes that McCarthy's dialogue often lacks attribution, but that "somehow   ... the reader remains oriented as to who is speaking." His attitude to punctuation dated to some editing work he did for

756-568: A few west American states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books. The predecessor of the Western in American literature emerged early with tales of the frontier . The most famous of the early 19th-century frontier novels were James Fenimore Cooper 's five novels comprising the Leatherstocking Tales . Cooper's novels were largely set in what was at the time the American frontier :

840-714: A history of his fur trading colony in Astoria, Oregon . Irving made quick work of Astor's project, shipping the fawning biographical account Astoria in February 1836. The Western as a specialized genre got its start in the " penny dreadfuls " and later the " dime novels ". Published in June 1860, Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter is considered the first dime novel. These cheaply made books were hugely successful and capitalized on

924-630: A mansion known as "Island Home" on what is now the TSD campus in the 1850s. During the Civil War, a string of forts— Fort Higley, Fort Dickerson, Fort Stanley, and Sevierville Hill— were erected by Union forces in 1863, and played a major role in forcing General James Longstreet to attack the city from the west rather than from the south during his siege of the city later that year. Major outcroppings of Tennessee marble in South Knoxville led to

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1008-567: A multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems . Unlike most members of the SFI, McCarthy did not have a scientific background. As Murray Gell-Mann explained, "There isn't any place like the Santa Fe Institute, and there isn't any writer like Cormac, so the two fit quite well together." From his work at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy published his first piece of nonfiction writing in his 50-year writing career. In

1092-906: A professor of English while enrolled at the University of Tennessee; he stripped out much of the punctuation in the book being edited, which pleased the professor. McCarthy edited fellow Santa Fe Institute Fellow W. Brian Arthur 's influential article "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business", published in the Harvard Business Review in 1996, removing commas from the text. He also copy edited work for physicists Lawrence M. Krauss and Lisa Randall . Saul Bellow praised his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences". Richard B. Woodward has described his writing as "reminiscent of early Hemingway ". Unlike earlier works such as Suttree and Blood Meridian ,

1176-413: A second companion novel, Stella Maris , on November 22. The latter was McCarthy's first novel since Outer Dark to feature a female protagonist. At the time of his death, 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. He left the beer on the counter and went out and got

1260-540: A textbook. McCarthy left college in 1953 to join the U.S. Air Force . While stationed in Alaska , McCarthy read books voraciously, which he said was the first time he had done so. He returned to the University of Tennessee in 1957, where he majored in English and published two stories, "Wake for Susan" and "A Drowning Incident" in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix , writing under the name C. J. McCarthy, Jr. For these, he won

1344-449: A trilogy of Western novels: The Englishman's Boy , The Last Crossing , and A Good Man . Other more recent Western authors include Ivan Doig and William Kittredge . The genre has seen the rumblings of a revival, and 2008 saw the publication of an all-Western short story magazine Great Western Fiction which was published by Dry River Publishing in Colorado . Nevertheless, the magazine

1428-461: A western novel with sex in it. That's right, the cowboy has sex with women. A new idea? Probably not, but heretofore this had not been seen in western novels (certainly not by Max Brand, Zane Grey, Owen Wister or Louis L'Amour). What these books actually showed was that men and women really did have sex in the old west. (Back when I started the series a rigidly traditional western writer of my acquaintance insisted to me that "women did not have orgasms in

1512-544: A year traveling the South to research the subject of industrialization there. McCarthy completed the screenplay in 1976 and the episode, titled The Gardener's Son , aired on January 6, 1977. Numerous film festivals abroad screened it. The episode was nominated for two Primetime Emmy awards in 1977 . In 1976, when McCarthy was 42, he met then-16-year-old Finnish-American Augusta Britt at a motel in Arizona. Despite their age difference,

1596-612: Is a purely human cultural creation and not a biologically determined phenomenon. In 2015, McCarthy's next novel, The Passenger , was announced at a multimedia event hosted in Santa Fe by the Lannan Foundation . The book was influenced by his time among scientists; it has been described by SFI biologist David Krakauer as "full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel". In March 2022, The New York Times reported that The Passenger would be released on October 25, 2022, and

1680-505: Is also the case of several other important characters in the Border Trilogy , including Billy Parhnam [ sic ], John Grady's mother (and possibly his grandfather and brothers), and perhaps Jimmy Blevins, each of whom are speakers of Spanish who were ostensibly born in the US political space into families with what are generally considered English-speaking surnames ... This is also

1764-538: Is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking'." However, his long-time friend Augusta Britt claimed that he had resumed drinking near the end of his life. In the 1980s, McCarthy and Edward Abbey considered covertly releasing wolves into southern Arizona to restore their decimated population. In the late 1990s, McCarthy moved to Tesuque, New Mexico , north of Santa Fe , with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. McCarthy and Winkley divorced in 2006. In 2013, Scottish writer Michael Crossan created

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1848-492: Is composed largely of dialogue. A western set in the 1980s, No Country for Old Men was adapted by the Coen brothers into a 2007 film of the same name , which won four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awards globally. In the early 2000s while staying at an El Paso motel with his young son, McCarthy looked out the window late one night and imagined what the city might look like in fifty or one hundred years and saw: "fires up on

1932-614: Is located adjacent to the Island Home Park neighborhood. Dogwood Elementary and Moreland Heights Elementary are among several elementary schools in the area, each outside the city limits. Celebrities and notable people who are from or have lived in South Knoxville include federal judge William H. Hastie , actors David Keith , John Cullum and Johnny Knoxville , cartoonist Darby Conley , author Cormac McCarthy , Brad Renfro , and Pittsburgh Steelers punter Craig Colquitt . In 2010, South Knoxville's Ye Olde Steak House on Chapman Highway

2016-516: Is one of South Knoxville's largest employers. South Knoxville's only high school is South-Doyle High School , which is actually located outside of the city limits of Knoxville. Other noted schools in the area are South-Doyle Middle School, South Knoxville Elementary, Bonny Kate Elementary and Mount Olive Elementary. South Knoxville is also home to the Tennessee School for the Deaf , the campus of which

2100-898: Is seen in Blood Meridian with the murder spree the Glanton Gang initiates because of the bounties, the "overwhelmed" law enforcement in No Country for Old Men , and the corrupt police officers in All the Pretty Horses . As a result, he has been labeled the "great pessimist of American literature". 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. Isabel Soto argues that after he learned

2184-485: Is way, way down at the bottom of the list." McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe on June 13, 2023, at the age of 89. Stephen King said McCarthy was "maybe the greatest American novelist of my time ... He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing." Western fiction Western fiction is a genre of literature set in the American Old West frontier and typically set from

2268-702: Is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists. McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island , although he was raised primarily in Tennessee . In 1951, he enrolled in the University of Tennessee , but dropped out to join the U.S. Air Force . His debut novel , The Orchard Keeper , was published in 1965. Awarded literary grants, McCarthy was able to travel to southern Europe, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Suttree (1979), like his other early novels, received generally positive reviews, but

2352-636: The American Southwest to research his next novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). The book is violent, with The New York Times declaring it the "bloodiest book since the Iliad " . Although snubbed by many critics, the book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles; Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying ". In

2436-680: The Appalachian Mountains and areas west of there. As did his novel The Prairie (1824), most later westerns would typically take place west of the Mississippi River . The notable writer Washington Irving was inspired by Cooper and wrote tales of the American frontier beginning with A Tour on the Prairies which related his recent travels on the frontier. In 1834, he was approached by fur magnate John Jacob Astor , who convinced him to write

2520-601: The Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. In 1959, McCarthy dropped out of college and left for Chicago. For the purpose 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" is the Gaelic version of "Charles". Cormac had been a family nickname given to his father by his Irish aunts. Other sources say he changed his name to honor

2604-497: The New York Times (April 19, 1992) McCarthy's novels often depict explicit violence. Many of his works have been characterized as nihilistic , particularly Blood Meridian . Some academics dispute this, saying Blood Meridian is actually a gnostic tragedy. His later works have been characterized as highly moralistic. Erik J. Wielenberg argues that The Road depicts morality as secular and originating from individuals, such as

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2688-505: The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction . McCarthy did not accept the prize in person, instead sending Sonny Mehta in his place. John Hillcoat directed the 2009 film adaptation , written by Joe Penhall , and starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee . Critics' reviews were mostly favorable: Roger Ebert found it "powerful" but lacking "emotional feeling", Peter Bradshaw noted "a guarded change of emphasis", while Dan Jolin found it to be

2772-527: The Tennessee River . Jerome Charyn likened it to a doomed Huckleberry Finn , noting how the Yew tree of the author's sprawling Tennessee garden was inspiration for the "christening of what became the principal character's name." In 1981, McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship worth $ 236,000. Saul Bellow , Shelby Foote , and others had recommended him to the organization. The grant enabled him to travel

2856-414: The 1920s also helped the genre. In the 1940s several seminal Westerns were published, including The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) by Walter van Tilburg Clark , The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949) by A.B. Guthrie Jr. , and Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer . Many other Western authors gained readership in the 1950s, such as Ray Hogan, Louis L'Amour , and Luke Short . The genre peaked around

2940-508: The April 2007 selection for her Book Club . As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute . McCarthy told Winfrey that he did not know any writers and much preferred the company of scientists. During the interview, he related several stories illustrating

3024-525: The Durango Kid from 1949 to 1955. The Franco-Belgian comic-series Lucky Luke by Morris (cartoonist) and René Goscinny is one of the most famous and estimated Western-comics in Europe. The popular Western comic strip Red Ryder was syndicated in hundreds of American newspapers from 1938 to 1964. In the 1970s, the work of Louis L'Amour began to catch hold of most western readers and he has dominated

3108-555: The German Karl May , picked up the genre, went to full novel length, and made it hugely popular and successful in continental Europe from about 1880 on, though they were generally dismissed as trivial by the literary critics of the day. One of the most famous pulp works of the era was Johnston McCulley 's first Zorro novel, The Curse of Capistrano (1919). Popularity grew with the publication of Owen Wister 's novel The Virginian (1902) and especially Zane Grey 's Riders of

3192-638: The Irish chieftain Cormac MacCarthy , who constructed Blarney Castle . After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy moved to what Lee's obituary calls "a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville." There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee 's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used

3276-798: The Pretty Horses (1992), for which he received both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award . It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing The Border Trilogy . His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men received mixed reviews. His 2006 novel The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Many of McCarthy's works have been adapted into film. The 2007 film adaptation of No Country for Old Men

3360-623: The Purple Sage (1912). The first Hopalong Cassidy stories by Clarence Mulford appeared in 1904, both as dime novels and in pulp magazines . When pulp magazines exploded in popularity in the 1920s, Western fiction greatly benefited (as did the author Max Brand , who excelled at the western short story). Pulp magazines that specialised in Westerns include Cowboy Stories , Ranch Romances , Star Western , West , and Western Story Magazine . The simultaneous popularity of Western movies in

3444-456: The Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy replaced it with an identical model, bought for him by his friend John Miller for $ 11 plus $ 19.95 for shipping. McCarthy was a teetotaler . According to Richard B. Woodward, "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago [i.e. in 1976] in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. 'The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,' he says. 'If there

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3528-404: The account was again a fake. In 2016, a hoax spread on Twitter claiming that McCarthy had died, with USA Today even repeating the information. The Los Angeles Times responded to the hoax with the headline, "Cormac McCarthy isn't dead. He's too tough to die." In 2024, Vanity Fair published an article about McCarthy's relationship with Augusta Britt, whom he met when he was 42 and she

3612-585: The case of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian ." McCarthy dedicated himself to writing full time, choosing not to work other jobs to support his career. "I always knew that I didn't want to work", McCarthy said. "You have to be dedicated, but it was my number-one priority." Early in his career, his decision not to work sometimes subjected him and his family to poverty. Nevertheless, according to scholar Steve Davis, McCarthy had an "incredible work ethic ". He preferred to work on several projects simultaneously and said, for instance, that he had four drafts in progress in

3696-405: The company of scientists. He voiced his admiration for scientific advances: "What physicists did in the 20th century was one of the extraordinary flowerings ever in the human enterprise." At MacArthur reunions, McCarthy shunned his fellow writers to fraternize instead with scientists like physicist Murray Gell-Mann and whale biologist Roger Payne . Of all of his interests, McCarthy stated, "Writing

3780-449: The degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his son was the inspiration for The Road . In 2012, McCarthy sold his original screenplay The Counselor to Nick Wechsler , Paula Mae Schwartz, and Steve Schwartz, who had previously produced the film adaptation of McCarthy's novel The Road . Directed by Ridley Scott , with

3864-772: The development of several marble quarries and finishing facilities in the late 19th century, most notably the Ross-Republic quarries at what is now the Ijams Nature Center, and the Candoro Marble Works in Vestal. The completion of the Henley Bridge in 1931 and the opening of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park shortly afterward led to an explosion of commercial development along Chapman Highway,

3948-468: The early 1960s, largely due to the tremendous number of Westerns on television . The burnout of the American public on television Westerns in the late 1960s seemed to have an effect on the literature as well, and interest in Western literature began to wane. In 1968 Charles Portis published True Grit , which became the most successful work of the era. Western novels, films and pulps gave birth to Western comics , which were very popular, particularly from

4032-602: The editorial advisement of Gary Fisketjon . As a final favor to Erskine, McCarthy agreed to his first interview ever, with Richard B. Woodward of The New York Times . McCarthy finally received widespread recognition following the publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), when it won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It became a New York Times bestseller , selling 190,000 hardcover copies within six months. It

4116-557: The essay " The Kekulé Problem " (2017), which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language . He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012. His final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris , were published on October 25, 2022, and December 6, 2022, respectively. Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. was born in Providence, Rhode Island , on July 20, 1933, one of six children of Gladys Christina McGrail and Charles Joseph McCarthy. His family

4200-410: The essay entitled " The Kekulé Problem " (2017), McCarthy analyzes a dream of August Kekulé 's as a model of the unconscious mind and the origins of language . He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, "is a machine for operating an animal" and "all animals have an unconscious". McCarthy postulates that language

4284-478: The father, and separate from God. The bleak outlook of the future, and the inhuman foreign antagonist Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men , is said to reflect the apprehension of the post-9/11 era. Many of his works portray individuals in conflict with society and acting on instinct rather than on emotion or thought. Another theme throughout many of McCarthy's works is the ineptitude or inhumanity of those in authority and particularly in law enforcement. This

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4368-461: The founding members were mostly western fiction writers, the organization began getting a number of other members from other backgrounds such as historians, regional history buffs, and writers from other genres. Western Fictioneers, founded in 2010, is a professional writers' group that encourages and promotes the traditional Westerns. It is the only professional writers' organization composed entirely of authors who have written Western fiction. Fans of

4452-451: The genre may join as patron members. The Western Fictioneers' annual Peacemakers competition awards prizes in many categories of Western writing. South Knoxville South Knoxville remained sparsely populated for most of the 19th century due to a lack of bridges spanning the river. Two notable early residents were Governor John Sevier , who established a farm at Marble Springs in the 1790s, and entrepreneur Perez Dickinson, who built

4536-478: The hill and everything being laid to waste". He wrote two pages covering the idea; four years later in Ireland he expanded the idea into his tenth novel, The Road . It follows a lone father and his young son traveling through a post-apocalyptic America, hunted by cannibals. Many of the discussions between the two were verbatim conversations McCarthy had had with his son. Released in 2006, it won international acclaim and

4620-425: The language, in his novels "Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other", as it was "an essential part of McCarthy's expressive discourse". Katherine Sugg observes that McCarthy's writing is "often considered a 'multicultural' and 'bilingual' narrative practice, particularly for its abundant use of untranslated Spanish dialogue". Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes, "John Grady Cole is a native speaker of Spanish. This

4704-514: The late 1940s until c.  1967 , when the comics began to turn to reprints. This can particularly be seen at Marvel Comics , where Westerns began c.  1948 and thrived until 1967, when one of their flagship titles, Kid Colt Outlaw (1949–1979), ceased to have new stories and entered the reprint phase. Other notable long-running Marvel Western comics included Rawhide Kid (1955–1957, 1960–1979) Two-Gun Kid (1948–1962), and Marvel Wild Western (1948–1957). DC Comics published

4788-419: The late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Well-known writers of Western fiction include Zane Grey from the early 20th century and Louis L'Amour from the mid-20th century. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the popularity of televised Westerns such as Bonanza . Readership began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s and reached a new low in the 2000s. Most bookstores, outside

4872-758: The long-running series All-Star Western (1951–1961) and Western Comics (1948–1961), and Charlton Comics published Billy the Kid (1957–1983) and Cheyenne Kid (1957–1973). Magazine Enterprises ' Straight Arrow ran from 1950 to 1956, and Prize Comics ' Prize Comics Western ran from 1948 to 1956. Fawcett Comics published a number of Western titles, including Hopalong Cassidy from 1948 to 1953. They also published comics starring actors known for their Western roles, including Tom Mix Western (1948–1953) and Gabby Hayes Western (1948–1953). Similarly, Dell Comics published Roy Rogers comics from 1948 to 1961, and Magazine Enterprises published Charles Starrett as

4956-469: The majority of McCarthy's work after 1993 uses simple, restrained vocabulary. There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous. Cormac McCarthy, interviewed in

5040-466: The many stories that were being told about the mountain men , outlaws , settlers, and lawmen who were taming the western frontier. Many of these novels were fictionalized stories based on actual people, such as Billy the Kid , Buffalo Bill , Wyatt Earp (who was still alive at the time), Wild Bill Hickok , and Jesse James . By 1900, the new medium of pulp magazines helped to relate these adventures to easterners. Meanwhile, non-American authors, like

5124-445: The mid-2000s and for several years devoted about two hours every day to each project. He was known to conduct exhaustive research on the historical settings and regional environments found in his fiction. He edited his own writing, sometimes revising a book over the course of years or decades before deeming it fit for publication. While his research and revision were meticulous, he did not outline his plots and instead viewed writing as

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5208-526: The next 20 years. Upon its release, critics noted its similarity to the work of Faulkner and praised McCarthy's striking use of imagery. The Orchard Keeper won a 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel. While living in the French Quarter in New Orleans , McCarthy was evicted from a $ 40-a-month room for failing to pay his rent. When he traveled the country, McCarthy always carried

5292-554: The next five decades. He maintained it by simply "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". Book dealer Glenn Horowitz said the modest typewriter acquired "a sort of talismanic quality" through its connection to McCarthy's monumental fiction, "as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife ". His Olivetti was auctioned in December 2009 at Christie's , with the auction house estimating it would fetch between $ 15,000 and $ 20,000. It sold for $ 254,500, with proceeds donated to

5376-430: The old west.")." Readership of western fiction reached a new low in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and most bookstores, outside a few western states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books. Nevertheless, several Western fiction series are published monthly, such as The Trailsman , Slocum , Longarm and The Gunsmith ; these are all "adult westerns". Canadian author Guy Vanderhaeghe wrote

5460-497: The politics that readers themselves bring with them to the act of reading the work". In one of his few interviews, 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. "I don't understand them ... To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange", he said. Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he

5544-491: The primary route connecting Knoxville with the park. As of the 2000 census, South Knoxville had a population of 18,516 residents. Economic initiatives in recent years have centered on improving the waterfront for recreational and commercial uses, development of the Urban Wilderness trail system, and improving the aesthetics and accessibility of Chapman Highway and Maryville Pike. The University of Tennessee Medical Center

5628-413: The production finished in 2012, the film was released on October 25, 2013, to polarized critical reception. Mark Kermode of The Guardian found it "datedly naff", and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone described it as "a droning meditation on capitalism". However, Manohla Dargis of The New York Times found it "terrifying" and "seductive". McCarthy was a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI),

5712-499: The site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack. Lee moved to Wyoming shortly after, where she filed for divorce from McCarthy. In 1965, Random House published McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965). He 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. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy's work for

5796-443: The stonework himself. According to DeLisle, the couple lived in "total poverty", bathing in a lake. DeLisle claimed, "Someone would call up and offer him $ 2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week." While living in the barn, he wrote his next book, Child of God (1973). Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God

5880-532: The time, McCarthy was living in a stone cottage behind an El Paso shopping center, which he described as "barely habitable". As of 1991, none of McCarthy's novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies, and "for most of his career, he did not even have an agent". He was labeled the "best unknown novelist in America". After working with McCarthy for twenty years, Albert Erskine retired from Random House in 1992. McCarthy turned to Alfred A. Knopf , where he fell under

5964-454: The two hit it off immediately, and he drew upon their experiences for Suttree , his work-in-progress at the time. By the following year, in 1977, when he was 43, but she was still 17, on a shared trip to Mexico, they had progressed to a physical relationship. They remained friends until his death. In 1979, McCarthy published his semiautobiographical Suttree , which he had written over 20 years before, based on his experiences in Knoxville on

6048-634: The two packs of cigarettes and the binoculars and the pistol and slung the .270 over his shoulder and shut the truck door and came back in. —Cormac McCarthy's polysyndetic use of "and" in No Country for Old Men McCarthy used punctuation sparsely, even replacing most commas with "and" to create polysyndetons ; it has been called "the most important word in McCarthy's lexicon". He told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred "simple declarative sentences" and that he used capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, or

6132-466: The western reader lists ever since. George G. Gilman also maintained a cult following for several years in the 1970s and 1980s. Larry McMurtry 's and Cormac McCarthy 's works remain notable. Specifically, McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and McCarthy's Blood Meridian (both published in 1985) are recognized as major masterpieces both within and beyond the genre. Elmer Kelton , mostly noted for his novels The Good Old Boys and The Time it Never Rained ,

6216-640: Was Irish Catholic . In 1937, the family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee , where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority . The family first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941, had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville . McCarthy later said, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks." Among his childhood friends

6300-589: Was "not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism . You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible." He cited Moby-Dick (1851) as his favorite novel. Along with Moby-Dick , McCarthy regarded The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ulysses (1922), and The Sound and the Fury (1929) as "great" novels. Socially, McCarthy had an aversion to other writers, preferring

6384-657: Was 16. The article claims that he took her to Mexico with a forged birth certificate and began having sex with her when she was still 17. Britt has confirmed this account but denied that the relationship was predatory or abusive. McCarthy did not publicly reveal his political opinions. A resident of Santa Fe with a traditionalist disposition, he once expressed disapproval of the city and the people there: "If you don't agree with them politically, you can't just agree to disagree—they think you're crazy." Academic David Holloway writes that "McCarthy's writing can be read as either liberal or conservative, or as both simultaneously, depending on

6468-557: Was Jim Long (1930–2012), who was later depicted as J-Bone in Suttree . 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 . As a child, McCarthy saw no value in school, preferring to pursue his own interests. He described a moment when his teacher asked the class about their hobbies. McCarthy answered eagerly, as he later said, "I

6552-446: Was a critical and commercial success, winning four Academy Awards , including Best Picture . The films All the Pretty Horses , The Road , and Child of God were also adapted from his works of the same names, and Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute short. McCarthy had a play adapted into a 2011 film, The Sunset Limited . McCarthy worked with the Santa Fe Institute , a multidisciplinary research center, where he published

6636-402: Was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing the Border Trilogy . In the midst of this trilogy came The Stonemason (first performed in 1995), his second dramatic work. McCarthy originally conceived his next work, No Country for Old Men (2005), as a screenplay before turning it into a novel. Consequently, the novel has little description of setting and

6720-475: Was not a commercial success. A MacArthur Fellowship enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researched and wrote his fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985). Although it initially garnered a lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since been regarded as his magnum opus , with some labeling it the Great American Novel . McCarthy first experienced widespread success with All

6804-462: Was set in southern Appalachia . In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas . In 1974, Richard Pearce of PBS contacted McCarthy and asked him to write the screenplay for an episode of Visions , a television drama series. Beginning in early 1975, and armed with only "a few photographs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre-Civil War industrialist William Gregg as inspiration", McCarthy and Pearce spent

6888-525: Was short-lived and folded after only two issues. One of the most successful Western novels in recent times was The Sisters Brothers (2011) by Patrick deWitt . Western authors are represented by the Western Writers of America , who present the annual Spur Awards and Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement. The organization was founded in 1953 to promote the literature of the American West. While

6972-407: Was the only one with any hobbies and I had every hobby there was ... name anything, no matter how esoteric. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home." In 1951, he began attending the University of Tennessee , studying liberal arts . He became interested in writing after a professor asked him to repunctuate a collection of eighteenth-century essays for inclusion in

7056-470: Was voted by the Western Writers of America as the "Best Western Writer of All Time". Early in the 1970s Indiana novelist Marilyn Durham wrote two popular Western novels, The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing and Dutch Uncle . Western readership as a whole began to drop off in the mid- to late 1970s. A partial exception was an innovation, the so-called "adult western". As Robert J. Randisi puts it, "it's

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