McCarthy Society Updates

The 2027 Chip Arnold Research Award

Application deadline: November 1, 2026

 

Undergraduate and graduate students can apply for this award honoring Edwin “Chip” Arnold, which confers $500 to be used for research on Cormac McCarthy, specifically attending an academic conference or traveling to undertake archival research. The award must be used at some point during the calendar year. The award also includes a one-year membership in the Society and a subscription to the Cormac McCarthy Journal.

 

Applicants should email a one-page application to cormacmccarthysociety@gmail.com by November 1. Please include your name, college or university, level of study, and for what purpose you would use the funds. More information is available here.

 

The Cormac McCarthy Library Project

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Cormac McCarthy was a voracious reader—and now we have the chance to know so much more about how McCarthy read, how he lived with books, and how he used his enormous and phenomenally varied personal library to fuel his literary imagination. Click here to find out more about this project, and how you can help!

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Richard Grant's article about the library and the project is now available online here, featuring photographs by Wayne Martin Belger. WBIR-TV Knoxville aired a segment about UT-Knoxville's acquisition of many of the books that you can watch here. And Jack Evans is making a film titled Cormac's Library—watch the trailer here.​​​
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New Scholarly Books

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Several new books are now available!

 

Tracy Daugherty’s long-anticipated biography, Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, is now out from St. Martin’s, which was excellent timing for our Cormac McCarthy conference earlier this month, at which Daugherty was a featured speaker.

 

Stacey Peebles’s Cormac McCarthy’s Maps and Mazes: Tracing the Critical Reception, a history of the field of McCarthy studies, has been published by Boydell and Brewer as part of their series Literary Criticism in Perspective (and is available for 35% off with code BB135).

 

And with McFarland, Scott Yarbrough has published Reading Cormac McCarthy: Scholars Discuss the Southern Novels, edited transcripts of selected episodes of his popular podcast Reading McCarthy, which just released its 66th episode.​​​

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Older News

 

New Criterion Edition of No Country for Old Men

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The Coens’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men is now part of the Criterion Collection! The new release features a new 4K digital master and a number of special features, including recently shot interviews with the Coens as they look back at the experience of making the film, and with DP Roger Deakins and associate producer David Dilberto. More information about the release can be found here.
 

Vanity Fair article

 

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.

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Ceci n'est pas SFI: A documentary about the Santa Fe Institute

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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.​

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Cormac in Other Media

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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!​​​​

 

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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. 

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McCarthy Gave 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.

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