Biography of Cormac McCarthy

"Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [my son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time." Cormac McCarthy

 Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 30th of 1933. He was originally named Charles after his father but later changed his name to Cormac after the Irish King and also the Gaelic name meaning "son of Charles" to honor his father. Cormac's family moved to Knoxville when he was four and lived there for thirty years where his father was a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. In 1967 the McCarthy's moved to Washington D.C. Cormac attended Catholic High School  in Knoxville and then went to the University of Tennessee where he majored in Liberal Arts. He joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953 and spent two of his years in the service in Alaska where he hosted a radio show. 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. While at the university, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. Cormac then left the university and worked as an auto mechanic in Chicago while writing his first book. Cormac married his first wife Lee Holleman, who is an author of poetry, who he met when she was a student at the University of Tennessee and had a son named Cullen McCarthy. After the marriage ended and before he finished his first novel The Orchard Keeper in 1965, Cormac was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship to Europe where he met his second wife Anne Delisle, who worked as a singer/dancer on the ship he took to Europe. They married in 1966 and that year Cormac was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation grant from 1966 to 1968. He and Anne toured southern England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. Then they settled on the island of Ibiza, which was a kind of artist’s colony at the time. It was in Ibiza that Cormac completed his revisions of Outer Dark.  In 1967 they returned to America and turned a barn in Louisville, Tennessee into a home where he started work on Child of God which published in 1973. Inspired by actual events in Sevier County, where he lived, it garnered mixed reviews, some praising it as great, while others found it despicable. During the mid 70's he also wrote a screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardner's Son which was also based on actual events. Anne and Cormac separated in 1976 and Cormac moved to El Paso, TX where he divorced Anne a few years later. In 1979 Cormac published his fourth book Suttree, which he apparently struggled with for many years. In 1985 Cormac published Blood Meridian which was not popular at the time but has since gained favor with critics who say it was the turning point in his career, he even learned Spanish to help with his research on the book. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992 after his original editor Albert Erskine retired. Apparently Cormac used the money from this book to buy a new truck. This was one of his first books that became truly popular selling over 190,000 copies when it came out. McCarthy then published the two remaining books in The Border Trilogy: The Crossing (1994) and Cities on the Plain (1998), the latter of which unites the lead characters from the first two previous books. During the same year that The Crossing was published, Cormac also edited and published a play entitled The Stonemason, which he had written during the 1970s. Cormac married his third wife Jennifer Winkley sometime while writing Cities on the Plain, they have a son John Francis who was born in 1999. The McCarthy's have moved to Tesque, New Mexico where Cormac is a writer in residence for the Santa Fe Institute. No Country for Old Men was published in 2005 and made into a major motion picture. In 2006, Alfred A. Knopf published The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. McCarthy granted an interview with Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen The Road for her Book Club. The Road was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Literature, and it also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The Sunset Limited arrived in 2006. He has also written a new screenplay called The Counselor but no one know much about it yet. Except for a few odds and ends (his favorite novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick; he doesn’t care for the work of Henry James and he doesn’t like to talk about writing.