On July 20, 1933, Cormac McCarthy was born. McCarthy’s novels are stark tales of morality, usually set in a bleakly amoral world.
McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee when he was four. “We were considered rich,” he remembered, “because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks.” He attended Catholic schools and served as an altar boy.
He never found school very interesting. McCarthy remembers that one of his few moments of lively class participation came when a teacher asked about students’ outside interests and hobbies. McCarthy was interested in lots of things outside the classroom; “I could have given everyone a hobby,” he said, “and still had forty or fifty to take home.”
In 1951, McCarthy enrolled at the University of Tennessee. He left school after two years to join the Air Force. He was stationed in Alaska, where he says he first got interested in reading. He returned to school in 1957, and published some stories in the campus literary magazine, winning some important student writing awards. He left school for good in 1959 without completing his degree.
When he began publishing professionally, McCarthy adopted the first name “Cormac.” He had been born Charles and wanted to avoid confusion with Charlie McCarthy, one of the dummies used by Edgar Bergen, a popular ventriloquist of the era.
McCarthy sent his first novel to Random House because “it was the only publisher [he] had heard of.” The Orchard Keeper wound up on the desk of Albert Erskine, who had been William Faulker’s editor and would edit McCarthy’s novels for the next 20 years. When the novel was published, critics commented on the similarity between McCarthy’s style and Faulkner’s—too much similarity, some thought—but they were impressed by the visual imagery and the emotional force.
McCarthy’s writing continued to impress over his next novels, though the consensus was that they were exceedingly dark, bleak tales. Outer Dark was a story of incest and infanticide, and Child of God described the making of a serial killer.
The 1979 novel Suttree was a change of pace. It was semi-autobiographical, and both longer and funnier than McCarthy’s earlier books. Critics frequently mentioned Faulkner (again), but Suttree was also compared to James Joyce and John Steinbeck.
His novels hadn’t yet found large numbers of readers, but those who were reading them were impressed. In 1981, McCarthy received a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly referred to as the “genius grant.”
His 1985 novel Blood Meridian was his most violent book yet, the story of a gang of scalp hunters who stalk and kill Native Americans in the 1840s and 1850s. It is now widely seen as his masterpiece and one of the great American novels.
McCarthy’s commercial breakthrough came in 1992, when All the Pretty Horses sold 190,000 copies in six months; none of his earlier novels had sold more than 5,000. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was the first of the “Border trilogy,” stories set near the Mexican border in the 1940s and 1950s. Like All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing was a coming-of-age story; Cities of the Plain brought the main characters of those two books together into one story.
His success continued in 2005 with No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, about the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong. And his 2006 novel The Road, about a father and son traveling together in a post-apocalyptic world, won the Pulitzer Prize. It was also selected for Oprah’s Book Club, and his appearance on Oprah’s TV show was the first television interview he’d ever agreed to.
McCarthy has occasionally ventured into forms other than the novel. He’s written two plays, The Stonemason and The Sunset Limited; The Gardener’s Son was written for a 1970s PBS anthology series, and The Counselor was an original screenplay.
There have been several film adaptations of McCarthy’s writings, most notably the 2007 film version of No Country for Old Men, which received four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
McCarthy’s writing style is distinctive. He usually writes in short, declarative sentences; doesn’t use quotation marks, and prefers to use the word “and” instead of commas. In general, he uses as little punctuation as possible, saying that he sees no need to “blot the page up with weird little marks.”
His dialogue is often unattributed—that is, there are no “said Tom” phrases to tell the reader who’s speaking—and many of his characters speak in Spanish, which is usually left untranslated.
McCarthy’s stories tend to be violent, and his outlook bleak. Authority figures tend to be incompetent, cruel, or both, especially those involved in law enforcement; and the actions of his characters are often based more on instinct than on rational thought. But despite his depiction of a cold and uncaring world, there is a strong sense of morality in his work, and sharp lines are drawn between right and wrong.
McCarthy does all of his writing on a typewriter. For many years, he used a 1963 Olivetti Lettera model that he had bought at a pawn shop for $50. When that typewriter was auctioned off in 2009, the auction house estimated that the winning bid might be as high as $20,000; it sold for $254,500. McCarthy replaced it with another old Olivetti, purchased for $11.
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July 25, 1920
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July 26, 1945
Helen Mirren was born. Mirren is a film and stage actress whose career began in the mid-1960s at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her film roles include everything from English queens and Shakespearean drama to action films and Pixar animation. When the BBC took on a seven-year project of filming all of Shakespeare’s plays for television in the 1980s, Mirren appeared in three of the plays, playing Imogen in Cymbeline, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
July 23, 1960
Susan Graham was born. Graham is a mezzo-soprano who performs in operas and in recitals. Her specialties include the French art song repertoire, and songs by contemporary American composers. She can be heard in programs of French operetta arias and songs by Ned Rorem; more of her recordings are available for streaming at Hoopla and Freegal.
July 20, 1964
The United States Navy lowered the first SEALAB to a depth of 200 feet off the coast of Bermuda. The three SEALAB projects were underwater habitats, designed to test the effects of prolonged living under deep-sea conditions. The SEALAB I experiment lasted only eleven days, ended by an approaching tropical storm. SEALAB II was the longest experiment, lasting about six weeks, with one “aquanaut” remaining below for 30 days. Ben Hellwarth tells the story of the project in Sealab.