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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/10\/05\/books\/review\/tracy-daugherty-cormac-mccarthy.html?emc=edit_nn_20261007&nl=the-morning&segment_id=227657",
    "parsed_content": "What to ReadFind Your Next BookFantasyScience FictionThrillersRomanceAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTNonfictionDoes Greatness Require an Ego and a Work Ethic Like Cormac McCarthy\u2019s?A new biography of the late novelist details his youthful escapades, messy relationships and intense commitment to his craft.Share full articleThe author Cormac McCarthy in 1973.Credit...David StylesBy Dwight GarnerOct. 5, 2026Buy Book \u25beAmazonApple BooksBarnes & NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshop.orgWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google CORMAC McCARTHY: A Legacy Revisited, by Tracy DaughertyThere\u2019s a deep, lonely commitment to work displayed in Tracy Daugherty\u2019s biography of Cormac McCarthy, who died in 2023. McCarthy often wrote in bed, balancing his typewriter on a piece of wood in his lap, and he didn\u2019t like to be disturbed.He didn\u2019t stay in bed all the time. His life, in this telling, was also packed with cars, cheap hotel rooms, interstates, young women, crazy friends, dive bars, and wives and children left behind, not necessarily in that order. If his life were a stock car, one side would have a dull matte finish and the other would have flames running down the side.This is the first full-dress biography we\u2019ve had of this reclusive writer, the author of \u201cBlood Meridian,\u201d \u201cAll the Pretty Horses,\u201d \u201cNo Country for Old Men\u201d and \u201cThe Road,\u201d among others, but it won\u2019t be the last. Indeed, Laurence Gonzales\u2019s McCarthy bio, \u201cIsolato,\u201d is scheduled to be published next spring.Daugherty is a prolific literary biographer (Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry are among his subjects), and his book is good enough, at least for a first crack at McCarthy. It divulges a lot of new information, dispels myths, has strong set pieces and does a bloodhound\u2019s job of tracing the overlaps between the life and the work.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTCormac Mccarthy Save to your reading list:Want to readHave readOn the downside, it\u2019s hampered by consistent intrusions of flowery language, as if the biographer got too excited and tried to compete with his subject. (Critics used to do this when writing about Tom Wolfe\u2019s books, larding on the dots and exclamation points.) It also imparts the slightly hollow sense that for every person willing to talk with Daugherty, 10 hung up the phone.If you\u2019re a hard-core McCarthy fan \u2014 a Cormackian, in the lingo \u2014 you can come to skim off the gossip, which Elizabeth Hardwick preferred to call \u201ccharacter analysis.\u201d McCarthy appears to have dabbled, when broke, in credit card fraud. Back in Knoxville, Tenn., where he grew up, he liked to attend cock fights, for the outlaw atmosphere and for the clashing social milieu: guys in overalls bumping into guys in tuxedos.He was longtime friends with the actor Stacy Keach (both liked shooting pool) and once played a round of golf with Clint Eastwood. He admired Robert Bly\u2019s \u201cIron John\u201d (1990), about rescuing masculinity, and bought an audiobook of \u201cMen Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus\u201d (1992), the best-selling self-help book.He was a dandy. One woman reports that, more than a week into a long river-rafting trip, he would still \u201cemerge from the tent like he was in GQ magazine.\u201d He was a sophisticated man whose friends needled him for his terrible taste in art. At the Santa Fe Institute, the interdisciplinary research center where McCarthy spent a lot of time later in his life, mingling with scientists and naturalists, he\u2019d bring back cheap prints from Hobby Lobby and tack them on the walls.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMcCarthy had a pitch-black worldview. It\u2019s never been hard to imagine him as a political conservative, but Daugherty brings the receipts. McCarthy had American flag bumper stickers on his trucks \u2014 one also had a nationalistic \u201cPower of Pride\u201d sticker \u2014 and watched \u201cYellowstone,\u201d a TV show that emphasized rugged individualism, property rights and gun ownership. He joined the Republican National Committee and read The Spotlight, a magazine known for promulgating right-wing conspiracy theories. There\u2019s an interesting detour in which Daugherty, leaning on McCarthy scholarship, argues that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings\u2019s novel \u201cThe Yearling\u201d (1938), about a boy in rural Florida who\u2019s forced to shoot the orphaned pet fawn he\u2019s adopted, is a key that helps unlock many of the themes in McCarthy\u2019s novels. McCarthy read Rawlings\u2019s book when he was young. Indeed, he auditioned in Knoxville and nearly got the lead role in the 1946 film version of \u201cThe Yearling.\u201d He was 11 at the time. Daugherty wonders about the direction McCarthy\u2019s life might have taken if he\u2019d gotten the part.McCarthy\u2019s family was, for Knoxville, well-to-do. His father, who had been the editor of The Yale Law Journal, worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The T.V.A.\u2019s involvement in enriching the uranium used for the Manhattan Project\u2019s nuclear bomb tests haunted the writer. Eccentric son and smooth father clashed their entire lives.McCarthy had five siblings. He was the outsider from the start. He was charismatic and witty but got poor grades and spent all his time in the woods, as if he were a latter-day Huck Finn. Later he\u2019d loiter on the more disreputable side of town, meeting the kind of hustlers and brainy screw-ups (one was nicknamed Waterbed Fred) who populated his rowdier fiction, novels like \u201cSuttree\u201d (1979), set in Knoxville, and \u201cThe Passenger\u201d (2022), set in New Orleans.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTHe attended the University of Tennessee but barely attended classes and was asked not to return. He enlisted in the Air Force and served in a cold weather station in Alaska. He read a ton of books up there, including a lot of Melville.A superior officer heard McCarthy\u2019s mellifluous voice on the telephone and helped him, in the early 1950s, became an announcer on Armed Forces Radio. It\u2019s interesting to imagine him there, against a horizon of mute ice, dropping the needle on \u201cTennessee Waltz,\u201d by Patti Page, or \u201cRocket 88,\u201d by Ike Turner.He returned to U.T. on the G.I. Bill. It\u2019s where he met his first wife, Lee Holleman. She was as wild as he was and wanted to be a writer. McCarthy would marry twice more and have two children. He wasn\u2019t built to be a husband or father. He was restless and work took unquestioned precedence over home life. All his relationships ended in separation.ImageHe had overlapping affairs. He was a \u201chound,\u201d in one acquaintance\u2019s estimation, and his friends\u2019 wives were apparently fair game. He was handsome, magnetic and deeply masculine, and he could hunt, fish, build a house, play the guitar, fix a car and hold a big room with his storytelling. He was catnip to women.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTA lot of writers look like Ned Beatty. McCarthy more resembled Warren Beatty. There is a letter from his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, referring to their \u201chuge erotic events.\u201d He liked his women young. Well into middle age and later, he dated women in their 20s, often Ph.D. or law students. After McCarthy\u2019s death, Vanity Fair published a heavily discussed article divulging McCarthy\u2019s nearly 50-year relationship with a woman named Augusta Britt, whom he\u2019d met when she was 16 and he was 42. Daugherty parses this material carefully.On the upside, Britt felt that McCarthy had rescued her, and he stayed close to her and helped her financially for the rest of his life. She was his muse, and saw herself, sometimes unhappily, in many of his female characters. But the details are grisly. It\u2019s unclear if, as one woman who knew McCarthy said, he took Augusta to her prom while she was still wearing braces. But he did pay to get her retainer fixed, as Daugherty reports. The Britt relationship has left McCarthy in a kind of reputational limbo.This book review is about McCarthy\u2019s life, not about his books \u2014 those have been chewed over endlessly, and they will be as long as this planet has serious readers. Daugherty is a sensitive reader of the novels, but he\u2019s especially good on the making of them, and on the editors who helped McCarthy along the way.McCarthy\u2019s early novels didn\u2019t sell at all. He wrote to a friend, at one point, that he\u2019d toiled for 23 years and had never seen a royalty check. His editor at Random House, Albert Erskine, had edited William Faulkner. Erskine\u2019s devotion to McCarthy \u2014 keeping him in print, finding money for advances and helping him win early prizes and fellowships \u2014 is as moving a story of editorial devotion as I\u2019ve ever read.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTErskine often couldn\u2019t find McCarthy for months at a time, because he moved around and almost never picked up his mail. They battled in a friendly way over McCarthy\u2019s punctuation, and his arcane vocabulary.Fascinating, too, are the scenes in which Gary Fisketjon, McCarthy\u2019s new editor at Knopf, and Binky Urban, his new agent, work to convince him to come slightly out of his rabbit hole (McCarthy hated to do any form of P.R.) in the 1990s to publicize the Border Trilogy, novels that became worldwide best sellers.McCarthy wrote screenplays in his later years and visited the sets of the movies made from his films. He became friends with Tommy Lee Jones, who nearly convinced Jack Nicholson to play Judge Holden, the brutal, scalp-hunting antagonist of \u201cBlood Meridian,\u201d in a film version that Jones hoped to shoot.McCarthy told friends he\u2019d \u201cdated\u201d Pen\u00e9lope Cruz, one of the stars of \u201cThe Counselor\u201d (2013), a crime thriller for which he\u2019d written the script, and found her boring. Josh Brolin, one of the leads in the Coen brothers\u2019 film of \u201cNo Country for Old Men,\u201d visited him on his deathbed.Extreme reticence is often a cover for extreme egotism. That seems true here. Is this kind of single-mindedness and arrogance what\u2019s required to write great fiction? A woman friend said of McCarthy: \u201cHe lived his life on his own terms \u2014 more so than anyone I have ever known.\u201dCORMAC McCARTHY: A Legacy Revisited | By Tracy Daugherty | St. Martin\u2019s | 514 pp. | $35AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT"
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