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.

 

The aim of The Cormac McCarthy Library Project is to publish a searchable online database with information about each one of the volumes that McCarthy had collected and used throughout his life. We are partnering with the University of South Carolina Press on this project, and the goal is to make the database Open Access—accessible to anyone, anywhere, without fees or restrictions.

 

Because Open Access publications necessitate resources from the publisher but accrue no profits, they require funding. If you 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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                  Click here to donate!​​

 

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!