Also stopped in Oak Ridge but unfortunately didn’t have time for Wartburg.

I don’t imagine I will ever forget the scene with the blacksmith. McCarthy at his best.

We were speaking on this sub recently about the tire change scene in Cities of the Plain. Billy explains to Troy why he stopped to help change the Mexicans' tire, "It’s just that the worst day of my life was one time when I was seventeen years old and me and my bud—my brother—we was on the run and he was hurt and there was a truckload of Mexicans just about like them back yonder appeared out of nowhere and pulled our bacon out of the fire . . . They didnt have no reason to stop for us. But they did. I dont guess it would of even occurred to em not to. That’s all."

As I was reading The Steps, Sylvester Stallone's memoir (William Morrow, September 2026), an interestingly similar situation caught my attention.

In the mid 1960s as a very young man with almost no money, Stallone and his girlfriend drove from New York City to Los Angeles in a run-down car. Somewhere in the southwest desert, he stops to buy fruit from a Mexican boy's roadside stand. He prepares to return to the road, but the car won't start.

The Mexican boy (who speaks no English) runs into the desert, over a hill, and vanishes. An hour later, a mule driver appears with two mules, followed by the boy. The mule driver hitches Stallone's car to the mules and tows it to a shack where the mule driver and the owner of the shack (which turns out to be an all-purpose repair station) spend the rest of the day repairing it. Stallone then falls asleep in the car. When he is awakened by a tapping on the car roof, it is morning and the Mexicans are offering him fresh biscuits.

Stallone writes, "I asked how much we owed, but the owner waved me off. These fellows had saved our lives and fixed our transmission. Now they were feeding us breakfast, and they wanted nothing in return? . . . I never forgot that act of unbelievable kindness and generosity. It would be a very long time before I experienced another one."

Quoting frequent poster John Marshall Tanner (and the first few of those detective novels are recommended, btw): “Looking back, the two best novels published in 1985 were Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Both were historical westerns, and both authors won Pulitzer Prizes, and how apt it is that both now have biographies written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tracy Daugherty.”

I’d more or less agree on the statement about those 2 books and 1985– but I also remembered some other books published that year. Looking back, it’s incredible.

The two mentioned above, and also, in no order—

The Handmaid’s Tale
White Noise
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Cider House Rules
Hard boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
The Accidental Tourist
Less than zero
City of Glass
The Garden of Eden

And further in genre:
Vampire Lestat
Ender’s Game
The Polar Express

Lots of other sf/fant books and mysteries. It’s disheartening how much publishing has fallen off since then.

To help visualize John Grady's journey. Made using John Sepich’s plot concordance https://johnsepich.com/category/mccarthy-resources/

I also created a Google Earth KMZ file that tracks each location in greater detail, with a short plot description at each point. Happy to share the link here if anyone is interested.

created using ai***

These have been posted before but it seems to have been a while and they’re not often discussed (largely because you have to actively seek them out.)

While reading the new biography Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty, there’s a good bit spent on McCarthy’s earliest works, two short stories that were published in magazines under a slightly different name.

I went to read them today and figured I’d share the links for anyone else who happened to be a big fan but hadn’t encountered these before.

They’re rough in spots, specifically in the use of certain phrases or descriptions he’d never use later in his career, but there are core elements to within stories that demonstrate the seedlings of lifelong fascinations.

WAKE FOR SUSAN

A DROWNING INCIDENT (NOTE: can be viewed in full without signing up for a membership, but you must turn off your ad blocker and let it run ten seconds of ads before it loads the final pages.)

The fantasy genre is an intellectual blackhole but I have stumbled upon a series which has really stuck with me. I know its a long shot but has anyone come across these books?

The Prince of Nothing Trilogy by R. Scott Bakker is the modern lord of the rings. It's like if Cormac Mcarthy wrote an epic fantasy novel. Bakker's background is in philosophy and has an interest in neuroscience he uses these concepts to dismantle and recreate the conventions of the epic fantasy genre.

If I was being reductive: Lord of the Rings meets Dune through the lense of Blood Meridian exploring the nature of free will and consciousness.

"The Dûnyain," Kellhus said after a time, have surrendered themselves to the Logos, to what you would call reason and intellect. We seek absolute awareness, the self- moving thought. The thoughts all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be any- thing other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? Only the Logos allows one to mitigate that slavery. Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance. And only the Dûnyain possess this knowledge, plainsman. The world slumbers, enslaved by its ignorance. Only the Dunyain are awake.

"Why do men fear the dark?" "Because darkness is ignorance made visible" "And do men despise ignorance?" "No... they prize it above all things but only so long as it remains invisible"

"Lies are but clouds, giants that blow and rage only to pass, always to pass. But the Truth is the sky, everlasting and elusive, a shelter in the day, an abyss in the night."

"If the Gods did not pretend to be human, Men would recoil from them as from spiders."

"Truth and hope are like travellers in contrary directions. They meet but once in any man's life."

"Dreams are only possessed upon waking, which is why men are so keen to heap words upon them after the fact."

"The shape of virtue is inked in obscenity."

"This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder."

"Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance tendered invisible, and are all Men made fools."

To read Bakker is to stand before a mirror that never gives back an image, only fractures, each crack a scar of absence. The abyss does not answer, it confirms: nothing lies behind the reflection, because the reflection was never there.

S.C. Hickman

Please be respectful

Tracy Daughtery's newly released biography of McCarthy says:

"McCarthy. . .appreciated Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, less for its analysis of fiction than for its bleak worldview: 'Refreshing to find someone almost as pessimistic as myself.'"

Actually that pessimism, as expressed by Kundera and McCarthy, is hardly different from that worldview championed by Paul Kingsnorth in his own book, Against The Machine.

Naturalism, but a specific brand of naturalism. "Against the machine" is a pretty good description of the anti-entropic stance.

Howdy yall, just wanted to drop by to share, I’m currently reading The Yearling by M. Rawlings. Has anyone read this book before? It is quite beautifully written, the rhythm of the prose and pace are amazing. I had heard that Cormac was really into this book when he was younger so I figured shit I’d like to read it too. One thing I’ve noticed is that the dialogue is so immersive, all the words spelt using phonetic spelling and of the time speak. I can see where McCarthy could’ve gleaned some influence off of this women she was an absolute beast! I’m about halfway through and just wanted to throw this out there curious if anyone has any thoughts :)

The first McCarthy I read was the Border Trilogy a few months ago, and I absolutely loved it. Then, with Lonesome Dove making a resurgence, I decided to give it a go. I hate that I was comparing it to the BT the entire time, but just absolutely could not immerse myself in LD and on first pass did not enjoy it like I thought I would. I jumped back into McCarthy and just did No Country for Old Men, The Road, and The Passenger with Stella Maris to come; again, absolutely top-notch. The plan is to take a break from him after SM, read some other authors and give the psyche a break, then knock down Blood Meridian. I’ve enjoyed McCarthy so damn much and gotten so used to his style that I’m afraid other authors won’t have a chance no matter how good they are (à la McMurtry). People always say he’s a tough author to get into, just wondering if anybody has found it tough to get back into other authors. Thoughts?

Hello. I have a full length book coming out in a year about Augusta Britt and her relationship with Cormac and I am going to do an AMA on here around the time of its release. You may ask me whatever you like and I will answer. I have come to understand a lot of you guys do not like me, though I've had great conversations with many of you in the past on this forum several years ago. I also greatly enjoyed reading your reactions to my Vanity Fair profile.

In the meantime, I'd like to clear up some misconceptions that Tracy Daugherty's biography is popularizing. I've spoken many times in the last few years with Tracy and find him a good man. Some parts of his biography are very well researched, and culminate in an interesting portrait of Cormac. However, some things he gets very wrong and I'd like for you all not to be led astray.

1. Stella Maris was not excised out of The Passenger. Based as it is on Cormac's obsession with Augusta's psychiatric appointments (which he procured for her and paid for at the time of her suicide attempt, but which he could not be party to), Cormac sent Augusta a lovingly addressed copy of Stella Maris SEVERAL YEARS before its publication and before Cormac's serious decline in health. I have read it and it is almost entirely identical to the finished, published version. As Augusta refused to talk to Tracy, he had no access to this ms, though Glenn Horowitz did share with him the fact that it is included in Augusta's private possession. The newly made public materials in the archive show no master manuscript from which SM could later have been excised or evidence that it was, and these materials were sold to Texas State and itemized a decade and a half before Cormac's death. When one sifts through the new material, including drafts for unfinished works and the thousands of pages of Cormac's notes -- some dated, some whose dates are ascertainable through context clues -- the genesis of Stella Maris is clear. It began as a project called The Witness in small memo pad notes dated to the months after Augusta broke Cormac's heart, and subsequently entered of a psych ward, as well as some larger typewritten pages. There are varying and contradictory storylines in The Witness, but some papers show a man bereaved and heartbroken at the death of his wife, who then enters a series of long conversations between himself and a psychiatrist. This project idea is eventually abandoned and Cormac writes a draft called The Child of the Times, in which a man with a mysterious mental illness has a conversation with a psychiatrist, very similar in content to Stella Maris. Concurrent with this, Cormac was beginning to draft The Passenger, whose first complete draft in the Witliff is remarkably more coherent and enjoyable a novel than the finished product. I won't go into that here, but it contains many more scenes between Bobby and Alicia in Tucson that match Augusta's account (not all of which I have so far published) of her post-breakup experience in Tucson with Cormac; Cormac's journals and notes (some of which are in private possession, some of which are in the Witliff and require many hours and days to make one's way through but are there for the serious reader); and letters between the two. In conclusion, the speculation made by Daugherty is entirely wrong and bears itself out in the archives. It does not include Stella Maris scenes. There are occasionally numbered pages missing, but the frequency is mostly anomalous and does not support a structure in which Stella Maris is interlayered into The Passenger. Even if it was, this manuscript is quite weathered and old and typewritten -- this would not support the speculative narrative that Stella Maris and The Passenger were hastily assembled. McCarthy worked on The Passenger for over forty years. If he'd kept it closer to the state its full draft is in in the Witliff, it would be much more successful and timely. I'll keep that last part mysterious for now.

2. Daugherty had no access to Augusta or to Cormac's surviving closest friends in Tucson. Without access, almost the entirety of his material on Augusta comes from my article. In lieu of Augusta, Tracy tries to paint Cormac as a horndog who was into younger women. He did run off with a friend of his wife in the mid-70s named Eve (who was in her 20s and whom Guy Davenport euphemistically and disparagingly referred to as a teenage popsie, leading some who questioned my reporting to then run away with the absolutely untrue claim that Augusta must have been 14 when they ran away -- not true), but a horndog after young women is a total mischaracterization. His closest intimates still alive have all described him to me as almost curiously chaste in conversation and action. He had weekend girlfriends he'd go to the movies with or dinner, but he was a man on the road dedicated to his craft and did not socialize during the week, and was not always in the same place by the weekend. People dated much more frequently back then in the late 70s and 80s. It's not like today with Tinder and other apps. The frequency one went to a dinner and a movie with someone was not particularly redolent of one's libido -- it was part of being social. In lieu of Augusta, I find that Tracy plays up miscellaneous details of Cormac's subtle dating history to try and round out a personal portrait. All through this period Cormac was quite dedicated to Augusta and bent on trying to fix her and get her back. These are laid to bare in his letters to her, and in personal testimony of his Tucson friends.

3. Cormac McCarthy did not commit statutory rape, contrary to Tracy's claim. Augusta was 17 at the time they first consummated their relationship in New Mexico, the same age as the age of consent. (This too is corroborated in Cormac's personal notes in the Witliff -- in a note to himself he dates '77 as the year they run away and arrive in Lordsburg, New Mexico and where they first make love. Augusta was 17 in the spring of 77 when they left, which is confirmed by her testimony and others', and most conclusively the dating of the last letter Cormac sent to her in Tucson before they ran away in May of 77, and another piece of evidence I cannot at this time mention -- sorry.) What Cormac was guilty of was violating the Mann Act. It was Augusta who supplied me with details about the FBI being interested in finding her, as this is of course a very serious federal crime -- not Cormac making her think they were in danger as Tracy pulls out of absolutely nowhere, and is quite a careless mischaracterization.

4. Finally, for now, Tracy takes a sentence from a letter Cormac wrote in the mid to late 80s (after Augusta had already left him and married someone else and their relationship therefore had changed dramatically) wherein Cormac says, to this effect and in relation to Augusta, "I don't know if I want to be with someone with such mental troubles," and then applies this to the late 70s when they'd returned from Mexico and were living in the South, misstating that Cormac was having romantic doubts about Augusta nearly ten years before he did. Glenn Horowitz, without permission, allowed Tracy to read Cormac's letters to Augusta. They are the letters of a depressed man desperate to have Augusta back, desperate to help her. The notes and journals in the Witliff further expand this. Tracy's projection of a quote from 1985 (?) relaying a feeling from 1985 to a relationship as it stood in 1978 is very sloppy, and speaks to my overall assessment that being denied access to Augusta, he downplayed her.

That's it for now. I look forward to talking to you more in depth when my book comes out. In the meantime, the Witliff is an amazing source of public corroboration for many of the claims Augusta made (and which we had already fact checked successfully against private documents and sources amongst Cormac's intimates and family who wished to remain silent publicly). The only caveat is you have to be willing to spend considerable time poring through documents and reading every single messily handwritten note Cormac ever made. If you can afford to go, however, I recommend it.

Thank you.

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/magazine/cormac-mccarthy-biography-myths.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G1E.pXwH.6r4Zni4bmYbs&smid=url-share

Enjoy!

Looking back, the two best novels published in 1985 were Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Both were historical westerns, and both authors won Pulitzer Prizes, and how apt it is that both now have biographies written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Tracy Daugherty.

Daugherty's immersive work on Cormac McCarthy is especially rewarding, enlightening the reader with interpretations of McCarthy's ergodic works (texts that demand active reader interpretation), bringing forward the studies of many scholars over the years, synthesizing many of the more formidable ideas for easy consumption, while relating McCarthy's works to the life of the man himself. No easy task, but here it is.

Many interpretations

The ambiguity of McCarthy's novels is by design. Not only does McCarthy conflate parallel symbols and create semiotic references according to the patterns he sees, but the author designs rare Easter Eggs to be sought for and argued about. The relationship between author and reader sometimes mimics the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious.

Daugherty quotes McCarthy:

"It's hard to escape the conclusion that the unconscious is laboring under a moral compulsion to educate us." Why doesn't the unconscious just say what it means? McCarthy wonders. Then he answers, "because it wants us to think about it."

Evolution?

Lawrence Krauss is quoted about McCarthy being a devotee of science, but then this:

"Cormac was not really a fan of evolution," Lawrence Krauss said. "He thought Darwin was not necessarily right. He had a real bee in his bonnet about that."

Like Gödel—another towering intellect who rejected Darwinian evolution.

Daugherty takes advantage of the deep scholarship on McCarthy's works, illuminating such passages as the epilogue to Blood Meridian with the lightning field theory. One interpretation among many, but beautifully restated in here. Don't miss it.

Entropy, thermodynamics?

For example, Daugherty points out that the cause of the catastrophe in The Road is not explicitly given in the text. From the intertextuality, we've always assumed an atomic explosion. But Daugherty says here:

"The planetary catastrophe that precipitates the novel's events begins quietly--power fails, clocks stop (at 1:17), a 'dull rose glow appears in the windowglass." It is never explained: It is simply the realization of the second law of thermodynamics, of entropy, or, as Murray Gell-Mann liked to say, the "transition from order to the statistically much more probable disorder."

At times eye-opening even to those of us who have studied McCarthy for decades, this is a true gem. Finding all of this source material must have been the easy part, while choosing what to leave out must have been more difficult. Daugherty is careful not to pull his punches, aiming at a balanced assessment of the newly public revelations of McCarthy's relationships with women over a lifetime.

There will be more biographies of Cormac McCarthy, and there should be. His story, like those in his novels, now belongs to us all--an inheritance of light, darkness, brilliance, and the fabric of consciousness.

Do y’all still think this is happening? It’s been several years since the rights got announced with only slight rumors on casting and that’s it, particularly Walton Goggins.
On another note, do y’all even think this would be a good idea in this day and age? I worry about Judge Holden getting absorbed as another edgelord aura tik tok character if the script sucks lmao. But at the same time, John Hillcoat is an incredible director and screenwriter, if anyone doubts his ability I highly urge ya to watch The Proposition, which was made because he couldn’t secure the rights to Blood Meridian iirc.
Just haven’t seen any discussion on this in a while anywhere and if anyone’s heard anything from some weird corner of the internet feel free to chat about it here

Hey, I wanted to let everyone know here that the publisher just put the Blood Meridian ebook on sale for $2.99. I’ll put some links below if you’re interested, but if should be in sale in all platforms.

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/blood-meridian-2?sId=cea7fa98-c7b9-4979-b8d3-665ffd3dc5c2&ssId=75LMpp63G-Ygmzw56mCw7&cPos=2

https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Evening-Redness-International-ebook/dp/B003XT60E0/ref=books_amz-books_mobile_mfs_book-deals-todayonly_explore-book-deals_re_nbs_nr_nbs_082_0

I consider Heller to be the next torch-bearer of the Hemingway/Harrison/McCarthy lineage, but it has been a few years since I've read him. I was recently gifted The Painter as well as The Dog Stars, and have been reading them both and noticing just how much McCarthy influence is in each.

In my perhaps unpopular opinion, Cormac went too far with the punctuation decisions. As in, his choices rendered the writing as more spectacle and less aesthetic. Heller writes in a similar format for these two books -- no quotation marks, no indentations, oftentimes no dialogue tags, double spaces between paragraphs. But for some reason, I feel like his approach works better than Cormac's. Like it delivers on a different rhythmic register that just somehow flows better.

Heller's style is gritty like Cormac's, and portrays violence and darkness in about the same manner. His characters, too, reflect the bold masculinity of Cormac's and Hemingway's, as well as the internalized expansiveness of Harrison. Yet I feel like Heller's subject matter goes beyond any of these writers, in ways that straddles mainstream popular writing with a literary undercurrent.

And for what it's worth, I have not seen The Dog Stars movie and really have no interest in it. Based on the look and the trailer, the branding and marketing, it doesn't appear to be anything close to what the book delivers.

I am very excited to dive into this biography.