The Cormac McCarthy Library Project

After McCarthy passed away in June 2023, he left behind an extraordinary literary legacy—and a houseful of books. (And several storage lockers full of them as well!) For as long as people have been reading McCarthy’s work, they have been speculating on what he was reading, what texts and authors he was drawing from. Now, with the generous permission of McCarthy’s family, 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.

 

Work is underway to create a searchable, online database with information on each of the books that McCarthy collected and used throughout his life, including some volumes that were kept by family members after his death and so will not be available to the public. Because McCarthy kept his books in several different places during his lifetime, and because the collection of books will not be held in a single location in the future, the database will be the one informational clearinghouse that will reflect his entire library and allow searches across all categories of provenance and destination. The goal is to publish the database online in early fall 2026.

 

Thanks so much to those of you who have donated to help make this project possible! If you too would like to help the Cormac McCarthy Society work toward this goal, we would welcome your donation. And your name would be listed as one of those who helped make this fascinating trove of information available to all of us.

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The Cormac McCarthy Society is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and so any donations are tax-deductible. Our EIN is 41-4440582. (We recently altered our incorporation, and so this is a new EIN, but the old one, 65-0642928, will still be usable through 2026 if you have already made a donation.)

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Click here to donate!​​

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Richard Grant's article about the library, and our project to document it, is now available in the September/October issue of Smithsonian magazine. Read about it all here!  The piece also features 15 photographs by Wayne Martin Belger.

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Jack Evans is making a film titled Cormac's Library—see the trailer here.

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And WBIR-TV Knoxville aired a segment about UT-Knoxville's forthcoming acquisition of many of the books. Watch the segment and read the accompanying article by John North here.

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We’ll share more details about the library, its contents, and its future in the coming months, so stay tuned. Thanks, as ever, for your interest in McCarthy’s work. Here’s to keeping the story going!

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The Cormac McCarthy Library Project

Stacey Peebles, Director 

Jon and Rick Elmore, Associate Directors