To understand Cormac McCarthy’s midlife crisis, look at America’s landscape. The fierce writer of biblical prose spent most of his first four decades anchored to Tennessee, a child of Appalachia with a lilting drawl and a regional outlook. By the early 1970s, he had published three Faulknerian novels—none of which sold well—and was struggling to finish a fourth book that aimed to chronicle his hometown of Knoxville in the way James Joyce had written about Dublin. McCarthy’s pockets were empty and his second marriage was failing. His then-wife, Annie DeLisle, recalled that on New Year’s Eve 1973, the year he turned 40, he suddenly announced that it was time for a change. As a friend put it, “He just walked off and left everything except his boots and his typewriter.” Pointing his truck west on I-40, McCarthy started driving and spent time in Tucson; Santa Fe; and Juárez, Mexico, before settling in El Paso, where he began researching a new novel called Blood Meridian.
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Few life swerves are so productive. The book represented a fresh direction. Instead of another story set in the forests and shambling urban peripheries of Appalachia, Blood Meridian (1985) was an epic Western. It ambitiously set out to align the nation’s past with humankind’s age-old thirst for violence: Wolves cull one another, and so do people. From then on, the fearsome stakes of the West—territorial competition, crime, blood, death—defined McCarthy’s fiction and yielded his strongest work.
His next five novels, including the best sellers All the Pretty Horses (1992) and No Country for Old Men (2005), used desert plains and bleak landscapes to unspool a grim pessimism, shocking readers with stark visions of depravity while preserving the slenderest candlelight of hope: a few good souls carrying the fire. It was as though Appalachia’s dense woods and city fringes had prevented him from seeing the page clearly. Out west, there is nothing but sky.
In Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, the first major biography of McCarthy, who died in 2023, Tracy Daugherty depicts his western reorientation as a turning point in his life and work but also looks for continuity. “The desert can be anywhere,” he writes; “the soul’s site of testing”—McCarthy’s lifelong fixation—is not limited to any one place. Although his departure was hurried, the transition took time. McCarthy made laps back to Tennessee during the 1970s and finished his Knoxville novel, Suttree, from his new base. The book was finally published in 1979 and unfairly panned by one critic as a “limited use of an enormous talent.” As for Blood Meridian, although it promised wonders to come, McCarthy’s first Western started off as a cult classic and only later, in the 1990s, began to find success.
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Yet once cemented, the relocation was the fulcrum of McCarthy’s life. After the ’70s, he never again lived in Tennessee or made Appalachian culture his subject. He eventually came to be so closely associated with the dusty boots and bleached bones of the West that new readers may be surprised to learn that the first half of his life was spent elsewhere. So why did he leave Knoxville? Daugherty presents a combination of personal failures and artistic imperatives that chased and lured him, respectively. Daugherty’s fascinating biography, which reflects impressive research in the Cormac McCarthy Papers at Texas State University, is very well told and filled with astute judgments about McCarthy’s 12 novels. Although Daugherty declines to elevate one part of his oeuvre over the other, the lesson of the biography—and the work—is clear. The cultural South may have been McCarthy’s home, but the West was his muse.
McCarthy’s father and namesake, Charles McCarthy Sr., represented urban order; he was set on taming the young Cormac’s backwoods waywardness. McCarthy later claimed that his father had beat him savagely during his childhood, afterward calmly sitting back down to finish his supper. Cormac’s artistically inclined mother helplessly watched the abuse. McCarthy Sr. worked as general counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal agency that displaced tens of thousands of Appalachian families to make way for hydroelectric power. He did so with brisk pragmatism and a clean conscience, infuriating his son. Each man was baffled and hurt as the other rejected his outlook. The tension drives the early pages of Suttree : “The world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it,” the father in the novel tells his meandering boy.
Siding with the evicted, McCarthy slept on the porch, explored the forests, and caroused with Knoxville’s degenerate class. “Like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, he liked to go slumming—remaining, just slightly, apart,” Daugherty writes. McCarthy listened and gathered material for his novels as often as he participated in the outlaw revelry. Yet he was no angel: A night with John Sheddan, a local misfit and frequent confederate, could as easily find the two sleeping in a barn or confined to a jail cell for public intoxication as discussing Thomas Hobbes. McCarthy studied physics and engineering at the University of Tennessee but never earned his degree, and began to read Dostoyevsky, Melville, and Faulkner during an uneventful stretch of Air Force service in the 1950s. His first marriage, to Lee Holleman, ended in divorce.
Family and friends offered few durable tethers to home, terrain that lacked lasting fictional appeal too. McCarthy’s early novels, beginning with The Orchard Keeper in 1965, chronicled the types of Appalachian outsiders and scofflaws he liked to run with. They proved off-putting company for readers. The books stood out as much for their desperate circumstances and ghastly subject matter (incest in Outer Dark, from 1968; necrophilia in Child of God five years later) as for their baroque prose and gothic settings. Suttree, the best of these novels and an excellent book, was nevertheless digressive and full of obscure, almost impenetrable writing (“rhomboid and volute shapes of limestone jutted all brindled with mud like great bones washed out”). Critics recognized a rare talent but also a voice struggling to break free of Faulkner’s influence.
[From the December 2025 issue: Thomas McGuane is the last of the literary outdoorsmen]
As his books misfired, McCarthy lived in an eccentric poverty that has become the stuff of legend. He cut his own hair and cooked canned food on hot plates. Working odd jobs (warehouse attendant in Chicago, garbageman in New Orleans), he recalled scraping by in “cellars on unemployment and welfare.” Without gainsaying these sacrifices, Daugherty calls out some exaggeration and myth building. Both DeLisle and Holleman contributed income; McCarthy’s Random House editor Albert Erskine helped him land fellowships and grants; and his parents, despite his strained relationship with his father, were a ready safety net. Still, between McCarthy’s failed marriages, family tensions, dead-end buddies, and dry artistic well, he had little to keep him in Tennessee as his 30s drew to a close.
A western reinvention allowed McCarthy to continue exploring timeless, elemental themes in a setting that befitted their gravity. In the American imagination, a cowboy’s journey is fraught, and his last breaths are tragic; a hillbilly’s exploits are hapless, and his final moments are merely uncomfortable. We cry for our heroes but wince for our outcasts. McCarthy sensed the difference. For a flailing author, the West also held commercial promise. “I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it,” McCarthy later said. “Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians.”
Daugherty bristles at McCarthy’s dismissal of “decades of Southwestern literature”—by Leslie Marmon Silko, Katherine Anne Porter, N. Scott Momaday, and Larry McMurtry, to name just a few—yet the remark reveals a certain canniness: McCarthy cared more about selling books than his austere reputation suggests. It is not the only time Daugherty upends his subject’s ascetic image. In person, McCarthy was courtly and gregarious, a warm conversationalist who liked to sing. One striking scene has him dressed in a new cream suit, dancing into the night on an ocean liner as he twirls and spins his partners.
Blood Meridian proved to be McCarthy’s best novel and a modern masterpiece. Its protagonist is notably a young man who flees Tennessee for the West. The book follows the Glanton gang of scalp hunters in the mid-19th century along the U.S.-Mexico border. In ominous, hyper-violent language, McCarthy displays a nihilism that situates humankind on the raw continuum of predator and prey, river and rock: “The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed.” Like an ancient mystic, McCarthy foresaw the endless reenactment of a horrifying cycle of brutality without meaning or purpose, a cursed birthright. “It makes no difference what men think of war,” says his most fearsome character, Judge Holden. “War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone.” To Daugherty, Blood Meridian’s clear-eyed view of American history was as amoral as realpolitik: “Politics as force.”
The Border Trilogy followed—the best-selling All the Pretty Horses leading on to The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998)—adding accessible characters and love stories to at last attract sales and awards. McCarthy’s writing began to shed some of its most ornate flourishes, taking on a stripped-down veneer. (Many of his later books were conceived as screenplays.) Critiques of the works as lightweight fare from the oracular McCarthy overlooked their hidden depths. This arresting insight, for example, comes to the young cowboy John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses: “He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.” Daugherty views McCarthy’s evolution in the Westerns as the pairing of a mature style with a genre framework. A similar combination has produced some of the best American movies of the past generation, by filmmakers such as Kathryn Bigelow and the Coen brothers, who directed an Oscar-winning adaptation of No Country for Old Men.
Although he started over, McCarthy could not escape the past. His celebrated 2006 novel, The Road—a sort of postapocalyptic Western—is built on a tender father-son relationship that both reflects McCarthy’s experience as a late-in-life parent and implicitly rejects his own father’s heavy hand. Daugherty quotes wrenching correspondence in which McCarthy and his father tried to reconcile as grown men. “There was and is a strong artistic streak in me that I inherited from my mother’s family and it has caused me a great deal of anguish in my life but an even greater joy,” McCarthy wrote. “I think this was always suspect to you.” Another relationship that echoed in his fiction was one that endured longer than his three marriages combined. McCarthy met Augusta Britt several years after moving out west; they became lovers when she was 17 and he was 43. They remained close for 47 years, but she protested the way he kept using her in his books, including in plotlines that seemed to mirror her life. “Well, baby, that’s what I do,” McCarthy replied. “I’m a writer.”
McCarthy attempted a second reinvention, a turn toward science. By the late 2000s, he was spending much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, where he hobnobbed with physicists, favoring philosophical conversations over writing books. The year before he died, he published a final pair of related novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which had been in progress for years; one of the main characters is a mathematics prodigy with a mental illness. In startling new reporting, Daugherty contends that McCarthy’s literary agent assembled the hodgepodge of pages and made the decision to break the mess into two books; McCarthy’s friends told Daugherty they suspected that the ailing writer had not even read the finished product. The result was unconvincing characters, mashups of McCarthy’s many interests, strange psychiatric sessions, and a lack of cohesion.
[From the January/February 2023 issue: The incandescent wisdom of Cormac McCarthy]
Maybe we all have only one good pivot in us. Or perhaps it was just too late for McCarthy to change course again. Whatever the case, his turn west in the 1970s reveals not just a man escaping personal failures but a restless writer who sensed that a wide new horizon might require him to expand his vision if he was to find his voice and his audience. The small-town hustles and degradations of Tennessee were ultimately too provincial for such an epoch-spanning talent, which demanded plains, mountains, and an endless expanse of sky to bring out its full potential. After all, deep in the Appalachian woods, you can’t see the buzzards circling.
This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Cormac McCarthy’s Midlife Crisis.”
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