Cormac McCarthy is an acclaimed American novelist known for his sparse prose style and bleak themes. Some of his most famous works include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men. Despite his success, McCarthy has remained a very private person who grants few interviews. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and continues to write while also interacting with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute.
Ecological Succession. ( ECOSYSTEM, B. Pharmacy, 1st Year, Sem-II, Environmen...
Cormac Mccarthy author presentation
1. “I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why
anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at
something else.”
2. • American novelist and playwright
• Genre: southern gothic, western,
and post-apocalyptic
• Known for being very private
• Grants very few interviews
• Compared to authors like William Faulkner and Herman
Melville, even worked with Faulkner’s editor for 20 years
• Cormac McCarthy often sets his stories against the
landscapes he knows best—the Appalachians near
Tennessee and the Southwest.
3. • Born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933 to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail
McCarthy
• Eldest son of 6 children, originally named Charles after his father but later changed his name to
Cormac (which in Gaelic means son of Charles)
• He was four years old when he moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and lived there and in neighboring
Sevier and Blount counties for most of the first forty-three years of his life. Three of the four novels he
wrote during this period were clearly set in East Tennessee. The next five novels were all set in the
American Southwest, especially in the border country around El Paso, where McCarthy lived for the
next two decades.
• Went to the University of Tennessee in 1951-52. His major: liberal arts.
• McCarthy joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953; he served four years.
• From 1957-59, McCarthy returned to the university, where he published two stories, "A Drowning
Incident" and "Wake for Susan" in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, calling himself C. J.
McCarthy, Jr.
• Has been married 3 times. Has two sons; Cullen and John Francis. His youngest, John Francis, was the
inspiration for his book The Road.
• Is now widely viewed as one of America’s premier novelists.
4. "If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking."
McCarthy has been sober since 1976
5. McCarthy has long enjoyed a close interaction with scientists, keeping an
office at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research center that also
houses a host of scientists, founded by the Nobel prize-winning physicist
Murray Gell-Mann. He has written few of his books there. He has also been
working as a scientific copy editor. He worked on Lisa Randall’s first two
books Warped Passages: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Universe's
Hidden Dimensions and Knocking on Heaven's Door. He also worked on
Quantum Man by professor of physics Lawrence M Krauss.
6. Fellowships & Grants
• 1965 Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters-He
used the funds to go to Ireland. En route on the ocean liner, Sylvania, he met English
dancer and singer, Anne De Lisle, and the two were married in England in 1966.
• 1966 Rockefeller Foundation Grant-supported the couple as they traveled through
Europe and lived briefly on the Spanish island of Ibiza where McCarthy began work on
his second novel, Outer Dark.
• 1969 the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing
• 1981 MacArthur Fellowship — often called “ genius grant.” The five-year grant provides
recipients with “flexibility to pursue their creative activities in the absence of specific
obligations or reporting requirements,” and it allowed McCarthy to concentrate on his
next writing project, Blood Meridian.
• 2007 Lyndhurst Foundation grant
7. Awards
• 1959, 1960 Ingram-Merrill awards
• 1965 Faulkner prize for a first novel for The Orchard Keeper
• 1991 El Paso Herald-Post Hall of Fame
• 1991 Jean Stein Award, American Academy and Institution of Arts and Letters
• 1992 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the
Pretty Horses
• 1997 Texas Institute of Letters Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award
• 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road
• 2006 Believer Book Award, winner for The Road
• 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Road
• 2007 Institute of Arts and Letters award, The Road
• 2007 Quill Award for general fiction, The Road
• 2008 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, for a career whose
writing "possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a
sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature."
8. He wrote all his works on this
Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter
that he bought in a pawn shop
for $50 in 1963 and sold in an
auction to benefit The Santa
Fe Institute (a nonprofit
interdisciplinary scientific
research organization) in 2009. "I tried to find the smallest, lightest
typewriter I could find." McCarthy estimates he has typed around five million
words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust
with a service station hose". The typewriter was auctioned on Friday,
December 4, 2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would
fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500. McCarthy’s friend
John Miller, bought a replacement Olivetti for $11, which is what McCarthy
has been using since the auction.
10. Oprah Interview aired in June 2007
“The Road” was picked for Oprah’s Book Club in April 2007
This was McCarthy's first TV interview ever. The interview took place in the library of the
Santa Fe Institute
Click video to
play clip ->
Click here to view Oprah’s full
interview with Cormac McCarthy
11. McCarthy’s Works
10 Novels
• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Dark (1968)
• Child of God (1974)
• Suttree (1979)
• Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
• All the Pretty Horses (1992)
• The Crossing (1994)
• Cities of the Plain (1998)
• No Country for Old Men (2005)
• The Road (2006)
He had been working on Suttree on and off for 20 years
“The Border Trilogy”- included the books “All the Pretty Horses”, ”The Crossing”,
“Cities of the Plain”
All the Pretty Horses was his first book to be on the Bestseller’s List
12.
13. McCarthy’s Works cont.
2 Screenplay
• The Gardener's Son: A Screenplay (1996)
• Written in 1976; published in 1996
• PBS movie in 1976
• The Counselor (2012)
• His first original feature-length spec script and was bought by the
producers of “The Road” and may possibly be turned into a movie in the near
future.
2 Plays:
• The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts (1994)
• The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form (2006)
• Turned into an HBO film in 2011
14. McCarthy Works cont.
2 Short Stories:
• "Wake for Susan" (1959)
• "A Drowning Incident" (1960)
Unpublished works:
• “Whales and Men”
• “The Passenger”
15. Albert B. Alkek Library, Texas State University, as part of the Southwestern
Writers Collection acquired Cormac McCarthy's papers. The Wittliff
Collection displays McCarthy's work from 1964-2007. The McCarthy papers
consists of 98 boxes (46 linear feet).
16. A first edition of 'Blood Meridian' and a draft of the manuscript are on
display at the Cormac McCarthy exhibit at Texas State University
17. McCarthy's manuscript of 'No Country for Old Men' shows his
notations and how he was working on the name for the Anton
Chigurh character. The character was later played by Javier
Bardem in the 2007 movie. Bardem won an Oscar for the role .
18. A display case of Cormac McCarthy's 'The
Border Trilogy' shows the work in different
languages as well as a screenplay .
19. Interesting Facts
• He prefers "simple declarative sentences“ and that he uses capital letters, periods, an
occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon.“
• He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot
the page up with weird little marks".
• He was poor for most of his career, living in places like motels, a shack with no heat and
running water, and an old dairy barn
• His first wife left him when after having his son and taking care of the home he asked
her to get a job so he could concentrate on writing
• He lived mostly off his grants and fellowships
• He never graduated from college
• He doesn’t care much for other writers instead would rather be in the company of
scientist
• He was an artist as a child and would have local art shows
20. “I like what I do. Some writers have said
in print that they hated writing and it
was just a chore and a burden. I
certainly don't feel that way about it.
Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you
always have this image of the perfect
thing which you can never achieve, but
which you never stop trying to achieve.
But I think ... that's your signpost and
your guide. You'll never get there, but
without it you won't get anywhere.”
• McCarthy currently resides in the Santa Fe, New
Mexico area.
• He remains active in the academic community of
Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe
Institute and he continues to write.
