McCarthy Society Updates
A new article in Vanity Fair covers Cormac McCarthy’s relationship with Augusta Britt and has provoked extensive commentary. Though some details of the relationship are evident in correspondence that is available in McCarthy-related archives, this is the first time that Britt herself chose to speak publicly about McCarthy. This subsequent New York Times article covers the story and some of that commentary, and quotes Dianne Luce and Bryan Giemza on some of the issues that are relevant to McCarthy scholarship.
Ceci n'est pas SFI: A documentary about the Santa Fe Institute
Filmmaker Karol Jalochowski has made his documentary about the Santa Fe Institute public, and you can watch it here. In it, various members of the SFI, including McCarthy as well as David Krakauer, Jerry Sabloff, Jennifer Dunne, Laura Fortunato, and many others talk about their own work and the interdisciplinary collaboration that SFI allows for and promotes.
Newest Winners of the Chip Arnold Research Award
The Society announces the winners of the Chip Arnold Research Award for 2024! This year, two awards are being given, to April Trepagnier and Sarah Yancey. The awards will support April's work on All the Pretty Horses, which she hopes to present at the ALA, and Sarah's research at the Wittliff Collections and her ongoing work on medieval imagery in McCarthy’s Appalachian novels. Congratulations to April and Sarah!
Applications for the 2025 Chip Arnold Research Award will be accepted until November 1, 2024.
New CFP
Proposals are invited for a new collection The Evening Redness in the West: Blood Meridian at 40, edited by Vernon Cisney, Jonathan Elmore, and Rick Elmore. Abstracts are due to jonelmore.english@gmail.com by December 1, 2024. Click here for the full CFP.
Cormac in Other Media
The artist Erik Ebeling has been in touch with the Society about a bust of McCarthy that he recently completed, and which is featured on his website, along with other sculptural works. Take a look here!
Society Officers on McCarthy's Legacy
Bill Hardwig on “Cormac McCarthy’s Fearless Approach to Writing,” in The Conversation, June 16, 2023.
Steven Frye interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Network for a piece called “A Giant in the Shadows.”
Honoring the Legacy of Cormac McCarthy
Books and Bridges
Thursday, June 22, 7:30 – 8:30 EST (5:30 – 6:30 MT)
A Conversation with Stacey Peebles
For more information about this Zoom event, and to register, click here.
John Hillcoat Tackles Blood Meridian
The film studio New Regency has announced that John Hillcoat will adapt Blood Meridian for the screen, with both McCarthy and his son John Francis McCarthy serving as executive producers on the project. Hillcoat has said that the screenplay would be “at least co-written” by McCarthy, according to an interview with The Playlist.
Wittliff Collections Acquires New Recordings
The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, home of the Cormac McCarthy Papers, has acquired recordings made by journalist Richard Woodward when he was interviewing McCarthy in 1992. Woodward was working on the New York Times article that accompanied McCarthy’s rise to fame, “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” The interviews took place over a few days, and total nearly four hours of conversation. Read more about the materials, and how to access them, here.
Karol Jalochowski Releases 2017 Interview with McCarthy and David Krakauer
In 2017, fillmmaker Karol Jalochowski filmed McCarthy talking with David Krakauer, the President of the Santa Fe Institute, in the library of the SFI. He's now released that footage, over an hour of conversation between the two, and you can watch it here.
Society Folks in the News
Among the many news pieces about McCarthy's new novels, a couple have featured some familiar names! This New York Times article from October 14, 2022 quotes Rick Wallach and features one of Beowulf Sheehan's photos, and this NPR segment from October 22, 2022 has comments from Dianne Luce, Bryan Giemza, Lydia Cooper, and Stacey Peebles.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal Publishes Never-Before-Seen Interviews with McCarthy
Dianne C. Luce and Zachary Turpin have discovered five previously unknown interviews with McCarthy, and reprint those along with five other obscure interviews in a new CMJ article, "Cormac McCarthy's Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968-1980." You can see the article for free, and read the full text of the interviews, until late December on Penn State UP's website. On September 30, the New York Times ran a piece about the interviews, which you can read here.
Society Establishes the Chip Arnold Research Award
The Cormac McCarty Society announces a new research award to help undergraduate and graduate students attend conferences and undertake research on McCarthy. This award honors Edwin T. “Chip” Arnold, the first President of the Cormac McCarthy Society from 1993 to 1998; editor, with Dianne C. Luce, of the collections Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy and A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy; as well as a colleague, mentor, and dear friend. We’re also happy to accept donations to help support this award. Click here to read more about the award!
New Photos of McCarthy
Renowned photographer Beowulf Sheehan has taken McCarthy's most recent author photos, some of which can be seen on McCarthy's upcoming novels and in Beowulf's 2018 book Author: The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan. With his permission, we're using a selection of never-before-seen images on this website, and we ran an interview with Beowulf in the Fall 2022 issue of the Cormac McCarthy Journal.
McCarthy Gives a Charming Little Interview
Lithub recently reported on two enterprising high school students who, in 2014, were tasked with giving a presentation to their AP English class on All the Pretty Horses. It turned out that they had a connection to the author, and so arranged to send him a list of questions—which he answered through a friend. Let’s hope they got an A! The interview can be read here.
Reading McCarthy Podcast
Scott Yarbrough debuted this new podcast in January 2021, and with 51 episodes to date on a variety of McCarthy-related topics, interest has been going strong. With well-known Cormackian readers and scholars like Steve Frye, Dianne Luce, and Jay Watson, Yarbrough explores different works and various essential aspects of McCarthy’s writing.
New Scholarly Books
Bryan Giemza's Science and Literature in Cormac McCarthy's Expanding Worlds is new from Bloomsbury Press, and in it he argues that McCarthy is the exceptional figure whose work allows and encourages us to interrogate the marriage of the sciences and humanities. Drawing from previously unsurfaced archival connections as well as a range of primary sources and interview subjects, including those close to McCarthy, Giemza places McCarthy's work within contemporary scientific discourse and literary criticism.
Steven Frye's Unguessed Kinships: Naturalism and the Geography of Hope in Cormac McCarthy is now out from the University of Alabama Press, as part of their series Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism. Frye considers McCarthy's work in light of literary naturalism, a more nuanced and far-reaching genus than the oversimplified Darwinism that many think of.
Dianne Luce's long-awaited chronicle of McCarthy's early career is now out with the University of South Carolina Press: Embracing Vocation: Cormac McCarthy's Writing Life, 1959-1974. Using extensive archival research, Luce tells the story of the creative evolution of McCarthy's first three novels.
Patrick O'Connor's Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned is now out from Edinburgh University Press. O'Connors argues that McCarthy's work articulates a distinct literary philosophy, one that pivots on themes of mortality, education, nihilism, the political, materialism, and language.
Lydia Cooper’s new book Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature, is now available! Cooper combines the fields of evolutionary economics and the humanities to examine how McCarthy’s works demonstrate our need to recognize the interrelated complexities of economic policies, environmental crises, and how public policy and rhetoric shape our value systems.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Cormac McCarthy, edited by Stacey Peebles and Ben West, has finally hit the shelves, with chapters by a number of familiar names, and guidance for teaching McCarthy in a variety of classrooms and in many different contexts--from high school to grad school, with attention to topics like region, sexuality, apocalypse, violence, leadership, borders, and ecology.
