Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy (actually Charles McCarthy ; * 20 July 1933 in Providence , Rhode Iceland ) is an American novel - author . McCarthy has received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award , among others .

Life

Childhood, education, first successes as a writer

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island and moved with his family to Knoxville , Tennessee in 1937 , where he attended Knoxville Catholic High School. He was the third of six children, three of whom were sisters and two brothers; his father was a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1967 .

McCarthy began studying art at the University of Tennessee in 1951, but joined the United States Air Force for four years in 1953 . He spent two years of that in Alaska , where he was in charge of a radio program. In 1957 he went back to the University of Tennessee. During this time, two of his short stories, Wake for Susan and A Drowning Incident, appeared in the student newspaper The Phoenix . In 1959 he received an Ingram Merrill Foundation scholarship, but left the university without a degree in 1961 and moved to Chicago , where he worked for an auto parts company and began writing his first novel. There he married his fellow student from Tennessee, Lee Holleman. The couple had a son, Cullen, and moved to Tennessee, but separated after a short time. McCarthy began an unsteady life, moved to Asheville , North Carolina , then to New Orleans , lived off odd jobs, and wrote his novel over and over again.

Writing career

McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper , was published by Random House in 1965 . He had decided to send the manuscript to Random House "because it was the only publisher I had heard of." At Random House, his manuscript came on the table of Albert Erskine, who until his death in 1962 William Faulkner's editor. Erskine mentored McCarthy for the next twenty years.

In the summer of 1965 McCarthy received a scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters to travel to Ireland . On the liner he met Anne DeLisle, who worked there as a singer. The two married in England in 1966 . Also in 1966 he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation , with which he financed a trip through southern Europe. The couple settled for a time in Ibiza down where McCarthy his second novel Outer Dark (German: Outside in the dark ) wrote in 1968 appeared and was favorably received very critically.

In 1969 the McCarthys moved to Louisville, Tennessee, where they bought and expanded a barn, but according to Anne deLisle, they lived in poverty. There McCarthy wrote his next novel Child of God (1973), which was based on current events in the southern Appalachians .

In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso , Texas . His novel Suttree (German: Lost ) appeared three years later , on which he had worked over and over again for twenty years.

With the help of a MacArthur Fellowship granted in 1981, he wrote his next novel Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985 / German: Die Abendröte im Westen ). In a 2006 The New York Times Magazine poll of writers and publishing staff for the most influential American novels of the past 25 years, Blood Meridian came in third behind Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld .

McCarthy was in 1992 a wider audience, when his novel All the Pretty Horses (German: All the Pretty Horses ) the "National Book Award" won. The other two novels in a trilogy, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain , followed shortly afterwards . The setting for these three novels is the western United States. During this time, McCarthy's second play, The Stonemason, also appeared . Before that, in the 1970s, he had written a screenplay called The Gardener's Son . McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men (2005 / German: “No country for old men”) had its setting again in the southwest and dealt with similar topics, but takes place in the present. The novel was filmed by Ethan and Joel Coen in 2007 and won over 75 film awards worldwide, including four Academy Awards. In 2006, his dystopian novel Die Strasse was published , received high international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. The film adaptation of The Road by John Hillcoat, based on a script by Joe Penhall, was released in American cinemas on November 25, 2009. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee took on the leading roles .

Also in 2006, McCarthy published another play called The Sunset Limited .

McCarthy is currently working on another novel set in New Orleans in the 1980s . It is about a brilliant 20-year-old mathematician and violinist who is staying in a psychiatric clinic because she suffers from schizophrenia. The story is told in retrospect by her brother, seven years after her death.

The Texas State University-San Marcos bought a short time ago to the documents McCarthy. Includes an unfinished novel with the working title The Passenger . This could possibly be the book project on New Orleans described above, as McCarthy is working on three new novels.

Private life

McCarthy currently (2010) lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico area, north of Santa Fe with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son. He shies away from the public. In one of the few interviews with The New York Times , McCarthy said that he did not appreciate writers who did not deal with "the questions of life and death." He cited Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples and said, “I don't understand them. For me this is not literature. A lot of writers who are thought to be good are weird. ”McCarthy is actively involved in the academic life of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute , which is run by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann , Founded.

Cormac McCarthy has two children.

style

His naturalistic verism is characteristic of his very drastic style, in which he depicts the fateful entanglements of his heroes on the fringes of American society . In addition to clear descriptions of nature, there are dialogues that seem to be taken from reality, but also descriptions that mystify processes.

In an interview with US talk show host Oprah Winfrey , recorded in the library of the Santa Fe Institute , McCarthy stated that he personally does not know any writers and that he prefers dealing with scientists. As for the outward form of his books, McCarthy said that he valued simple statements. Furthermore, that he occasionally uses capital letters, periods and now and then a comma . He didn't use quotation marks and said there was no reason to "sprinkle strange little characters" on the book pages. McCarthy's punctuation is not based on the school standard, but on the understanding of the text that he desired and thus evoked.

reception

McCarthy received literary awards for many of his books. His 1985 book Blood Meridian was listed in Time magazine based on a poll of the 100 best books in English published between 1923 and 2005. In a 2006 poll hosted by The New York Times, Best American novel, published in the last 25 years, he was very high. The literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four most important living American novelists, along with Don DeLillo , Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth . He is often compared by literary critics to William Faulkner . McCarthy is increasingly mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate in the usually well-informed Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet .

McCarthy also wrote two plays.

Awards

For his books he was, among other things with the Faulkner Award , the American Academy Award, the National Book Award (dt., The National Book Critics Circle Award and 2007 for his novel "The Road" The road ) with the Pulitzer Prize awarded. The Japanese Maltese Falcon Society awarded him the Maltese Falcon Award in 2008 for his film novel No Country for Old Men (Eng .: No country for old men ) . He has also been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1994 and of the American Philosophical Society since 2012 .

bibliography

Novels

Plays, scripts

  • Whales and Men [unpublished]
  • 1984 Cities of the Plain [unpublished]
  • 1994 The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts
  • 1996 The Gardener's Son: A Screenplay
  • No Country for Old Men [unreleased]
  • 2006 Sunset Limited (stage play)
  • 2012 The Counselor [unpublished]

Film adaptations

Secondary literature

  • Sascha Löwenstein: The living self - basic features of a literary anthropology in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. in: Thomas Maier, Sascha Löwenstein (eds.): Beautiful dying. Lectures on literature at Heinrich von Veldeke Kreis. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Berlin 2013, pp. 26–58
  • Andreas Mauz: Along the street. About Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' (2006). in: David Plüss et al. (Ed.): In the eye of the flaneurs. Findings for religious art of living. Festschrift Albrecht Grözinger . TVZ, Zurich 2009 (Christianity and Culture, 11), pp. 275–287
  • Christoph Schneider: Pastoral hopelessness. Cormac McCarthy's melancholy and evil. in: Natalia Borissova, Susi K. Frank, Andreas Kraft (eds.): Between apocalypse and everyday life. War narratives of the 20th and 21st centuries. Transcript. Bielefeld 2009 ISBN 3-8376-1045-4 pp. 171-200

Web links

Commons : Cormac McCarthy  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Don Williams: Cormac McCarthy Crosses the Great Divide , New Millennium Writings. Archived from the original on March 3, 2016 Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / newmillenniumwritings.com 
  2. ^ A b c Edwin Arnold : Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy . University Press of Mississippi, 1999, ISBN 1-57806-105-9 .
  3. ^ A b Richard Woodward: Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction , The New York Times. April 19, 1992. Retrieved August 24, 2006. 
  4. ↑ [https // www.sueddeutsche.de / culture / vorgeblaettert-genie-und-wahnsinn-1.2648427? Reduced = true Ulrike Duhm: Genius and madness. Cormac McCarthy is the great loner of US literature. SZ from 16.9.2015, p. 14.] .
  5. ↑ Cormac McCarthy archive goes on display in Texas | Books | guardian.co.uk . Guardian. Retrieved January 11, 2010.
  6. ↑ Fred Brown, Cormac McCarthy: On the trail of a legend; Author's writing reveals how East Tennessee shaped the man ( Memento of the original from March 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Knoxville News Sentinel , December 16, 2007 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.knoxnews.com
  7. ^ Your Reader's Guide to The Road , www.oprah.com. 
  8. ^ Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo: All Time 100 Novels - The Complete List , Time .  Retrieved June 3, 2008
  9. ^ What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years? , The New York Times.  Retrieved June 3, 2008
  10. ↑ Harold Bloom: Dumbing down American readers . In: Literary critic , Boston Globe, September 24, 2003. Retrieved December 4, 2009. 
  11. ↑ Svenska Dagbladet , October 7, 2010: ” Här är favoriterna till litteraturpriset… ” (German: “These are the favorites for the literary prize…”) or Svenska Dagbladet , October 7, 2009, last changed on October 8, 2009: ” Vem tror / vill du ska få årets Nobelpris i literature? ”(German:“ Who do you think / do you want to get the Nobel Prize for Literature from this year? ”)
  12. ^ Member History: Cormac McCarthy. American Philosophical Society, accessed February 2, 2019 .
  13. ↑ FAZ of October 7, 2010, page 31: The world in the allegorical stage
personal data
SURNAME McCarthy, Cormac
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Providence