Biography

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He is the third of six
children (the eldest son) born to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail
McCarthy (he has two brothers and three sisters). Originally named Charles (after his
father), he renamed himself Cormac after the Irish King (another source says that
McCarthy’s family was responsible for legally changing his name to the Gaelic
equivalent of “son of Charles”).

Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He attended Catholic High School in Knoxville,
then 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, spending two of them
stationed in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show.

Before his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published (1965—McCarthy’s editor
at Random House was Faulkner’s long-time editor, Albert Erskine), McCarthy had
received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In
1965, using this money, he left America on the liner Sylvania, intending to visit the
home of his Irish ancestors (a King Cormac McCarthy built Blarney Castle). While on
the trip, he met Anne DeLisle, a young English singer/dancer working on the ship;
they were married in England in 1966. Another grant was given McCarthy in 1966, a
Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966-68). 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. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of Outer
Dark.

In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book which had occupied his
writing life on and off for twenty or so years. It was said by many to be McCarthy’s
best work to date, and some critics still maintain that it is his finest novel. However,
the book drew some negative reviews, too. At least one reviewer (who wrote for the
Memphis Press Scimitar) was roundly rebuked in a letter to the editor written by
novelist and historian Shelby Foote.

1981 brought another grant to McCarthy’s door (or, more literally, to McCarthy’s
room in a motel run by a friend in Knoxville), this time a MacArthur Fellowship—one
of their so-called genius grants. McCarthy used this money to live on while writing his
next novel, an apocalyptic western set in Texas and Mexico during the 1840s and
based heavily on actual historical events.

2005 brought the publication of No Country for Old Men, which was adapted into an
award-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen.

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.

References

Urban, A., The Official Web Site of the Cormac McCarthy Society, New York 10019.
https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/biography/