Cormac McCarthy - Personal Life

Personal Life

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, one of six children of Charles Joseph McCarthy and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy. In 1937, his family relocated to Knoxville, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The family initially lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941 had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville (this latter house burned in 2009). McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee from 1951–52 and 1957–59 but never graduated. While at UT he published two stories in The Phoenix and was awarded the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960.

After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, he and she "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville." There they had a son, Cullen, in 1962. While caring for the baby and tending to the chores of the house, Lee was asked by Cormac to also get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching."

McCarthy now lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico area, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy. In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy reveals that he is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange." McCarthy remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy told Winfrey that he does not know any writers and much prefers the company of scientists. During the interview he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road. McCarthy told Oprah that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks."

In October 2007, Time Magazine published a conversation between McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, on the eve of their adaptation of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. During the conversation, McCarthy talked about his taste in cinema, claiming he's "not that big a fan of exotic foreign films" and citing Five Easy Pieces and Days of Heaven as "good movies" while praising the Coens' own Miller's Crossing as "a very, very fine movie". Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he's "not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible.".

According to Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The machine had been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used typewriter for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy estimates he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The Olivetti was auctioned on Friday, December 4, 2009 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500. Its replacement is another Olivetti, bought for McCarthy by his friend John Miller for $11. The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.