Cormac McCarthy was born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.
Cormac McCarthy was born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. on July 20, 1933, and died on June 13, 2023. ◦ He was an American author who wrote twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western, post-apocalyptic, and Southern Gothic genres. ◦ He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, but raised primarily in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. ◦ His family was Irish Catholic, and he was an altar boy at Knoxville's Church of the Immaculate Conception. ◦ He left the University of Tennessee without a degree and never graduated. ◦ He worked with the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2012. ◦ As a child he said, "I 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." ◦ He also said, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks." ◦
McCarthy held that there is no such thing as life without bloodshed. ◦ He viewed the notion that the species can be improved and that everyone could live in harmony as a dangerous idea, stating that those afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom, and that the desire for harmony enslaves and makes life vacuous. ◦ He maintained that everything is interesting and that he had not been bored in 50 years. ◦ In his essay "The Kekulé Problem," he argued that the unconscious is a biological system and a machine for operating an animal. ◦ He contended that all animals have an unconscious, and that without it they would be plants. ◦ He argued that the actual process of thinking is largely nonverbal and unconscious. ◦ He proposed that language was not a need but an invention that spread instantly and parasitically upon a far older animal brain. ◦ He located the central idea of language in metaphor — that one thing can be another thing — and dated this insight to roughly a hundred thousand years ago. ◦ He suggested that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions, indicating that it does not much like language and does not trust it, because it had been getting along without it for a couple of million years. ◦
McCarthy became interested in writing after a professor asked him to repunctuate a collection of eighteenth-century essays for inclusion in a textbook. ◦ A MacArthur Fellowship enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researched and wrote *Blood Meridian* (1985). ◦ During his writing years, he refused university speaking engagements offering $2,000, telling callers that everything he had to say was there on the page. ◦ He stated, "I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this." ◦ He estimated that he owned about 7,000 books, nearly all of them in storage lockers. ◦ He described his routine as getting up, having coffee, wandering around, reading a little bit, sitting down to type a few words, and looking out the window. ◦ Regarding collaborative filmmaking, he replied that it would compel one to avoid it at all costs. ◦
McCarthy opened "The Kekulé Problem" with the puzzle that chemist Kekulé arrived at the ring structure of benzene through a dream of a snake with its tail in its mouth — the ouroboros — rather than a verbal answer. ◦ He characterized the unconscious as a machine for operating an animal and a biological system before anything else. ◦ He argued that the actual process of thinking is largely an unconscious affair and that if one believes they actually use language in solving problems, he wished they would write to him and tell him how they go about it. ◦ He proposed that language acted very much like a parasitic invasion upon a far older animal brain. ◦ He located the central idea of language in metaphor — that one thing can be another thing — and identified it with the idea that Helen Keller suddenly understood at the well. ◦ He framed the deep tension of human cognition as the unconscious's distrust of language, because it had been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years. ◦
McCarthy wrote twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories. ◦ His novel *The Road* won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. ◦ *Blood Meridian* has been regarded as his magnum opus, with some labeling it the Great American Novel. ◦ He published the essay "The Kekulé Problem" (2017), which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language. ◦ He said, "The ugly fact is books are made out of books," and that "The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written." ◦ His list of "good writers" included Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner, while he said of Proust and Henry James, "I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature." ◦ His favorite book is *Moby Dick* by Herman Melville. ◦
His writing style is characterized by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. ◦ His prose is minimally punctuated, without quotation marks, avoiding apostrophes, colons, or semicolons. ◦ He would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, or Wittgenstein than himself or his books. ◦ He said, "Of all the subjects I'm interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn't," and that writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list. ◦ His works often include graphic depictions of violence. ◦
McCarthy spent years in deep poverty, yet when offered $2,000 to speak at a university, he refused and said everything he had to say was on the page, resulting in eating beans for another week. ◦ He claimed writing is "way, way down at the bottom of the list" of his interests, yet produced a substantial body of work across multiple genres. ◦ He asserted that he never had doubts about his abilities, yet acknowledged he had to figure out how to eat while writing. ◦ He described language as a parasitic invasion that the unconscious distrusts, yet built his career on written language. ◦ He said collaborative filmmaking would compel one to avoid it at all costs, yet wrote five screenplays. ◦ ◦ He excluded Proust and Henry James from literature, saying, "I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature." ◦
He would rather talk about rattlesnakes, molecular computers, country music, or Wittgenstein than himself or his books. ◦ He declined paid speaking invitations at universities, indicating that everything he had to say was there on the page. ◦ He maintained that of all the subjects he was interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one he wasn't. ◦