I often write about libraries, and about a dozen posts relate to the libraries of individuals, not the institutional kind. The last one, about Darwin's Library, contains links to some of the others. Scholars like to browse through them, looking for influences, while many of us are just curious about the books to be found on the shelves in private homes.
Little was known about Cormac McCarthy's library since he led a rather solitary life in a house near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Apart from writing he would hang out at the Santa Fe Institute which is a scientific research center. Perhaps that explains why his collection of over 20,000 books (with more in storage) covers many subjects. The group of scholars attempting to organize and catalog the collection have already discovered that,
"discernible in his work but confirmed beyond doubt in his library, was that McCarthy was a genius-level intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity. His interests ranged from quantum physics, which he taught himself by reading 190 books on the notoriously challenging subject, to whale biology, violins, obscure corners of French history in the early Middle Ages, the highest levels of advanced mathematics and almost any other subject you can name."
In my small collection, I do not have any books by McCarthy, although I did read The Road and saw the movie, No Country For Old Men. His library, however, contains books by a wide assortment of authors as this description indicates:
"Giemza marveled at the heavy-duty philosophy books they were finding. “Seventy-five titles by or about Wittgenstein so far,” he said, referring to the Austrian philosopher of mathematics, logic, language and the mind. “And most of them are annotated, meaning Cormac read them closely. A lot of Hegel. That was his light evening reading, apparently.”
In the living room was a pool table piled with books and a leather couch facing two tall windows and three sets of nine-foot-tall wooden bookshelves designed by McCarthy that held approximately 1,000 books. Moving closer, I saw they were nearly all nonfiction hardbacks with no obvious system of organization.
One shelf held volumes about Mesoamerican history and archaeology, along with Charles Darwin’s collected notebooks, Victor Klemperer’s three-volume diary of the Nazi years, books about organic chemistry and sports cars, and an obscure volume titled The Biology of the Naked Mole-Rat (Monographs in Behavior and Ecology). Another shelf held books about Grand Prix and Formula 1 racing, a great passion of McCarthy’s, and the collected writings of Charles S. Peirce, the American scientist, philosopher and logician, in six fat volumes of dense, difficult prose."
McCarthy wins a MacArthur
McCarthy grew up in Knoxville in a relatively wealthy family, 'but Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation." In the early '80s, however, he did win a "Genius Grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, a fellowship that comes with a considerable amount of money. He was, of course, very successful in his later career, and at the end of it he sold his archives to Texas State University for $2 million. One reason he had so many books is that he did not use the Internet or a computer. His Olivetti sold for $254,500 at auction.
The Bonus:
Apart from books, he also left behind a few automobiles. Here is a description from the article by Richard Grant, cited below:
"I parked behind the house between a silver 1966 Buick Riviera rusting on deflated tires and a weathered red Lincoln Mark VIII. These were among the last survivors of McCarthy’s little-known vehicle collection. Dennis had sold 13 other cars, including two Allard racing cars from the early 1950s, a 1992 Lotus and a Ford GT40 racing car. McCarthy, who labored in obscurity and chronic poverty until he was 60, became a multi-millionaire later in life and freely indulged his desires and obsessions, with classic sports cars high on the list. Most of the money came from Hollywood, which turned three of his novels—All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road—into star-studded movies."
Sources:
The quote above and the picture of the typewriter are from this obituary: Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89: “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders," Dwight Garner, New York Times, June 13, 2023. For another obit: "Cormac McCarthy, Spare and Haunting Novelist, Dies at 89," Harrison Smith, Washington Post, June 13, 2023.
The description of his library is from this very good article and the title indicates that examining private libraries can be revealing: "Two Years After Cormac McCarthy’s Death, Rare Access to His Personal Library Reveals the Man Behind the Myth," Richard Grant, Smithsonian Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2025.
For more about his library see: The Cormac McCarthy Library Project. There is a Cormac McCarthy Society and they produce one of those single-author journals which I have often discussed, The Cormac McCarthy Journal. See, for example, "Periodical Ramblings (8)".
