Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences

In this diligent but dry study, Crews, an English professor at Regent University, mines Cormac McCarthy’s archives in the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University to unearth the celebrated author’s literary influences. In steady, workmanlike fashion, Crews narrates rifling through boxes of material, sorting through multiple drafts, correspondence, and marginalia in search of direct citations of other writers and their books. For example, McCarthy has a note entitled “On Camus” in the margins of an early draft of his novel Outer Dark, suggesting a debt to French existentialism. In researching the novel Suttree, Crews discovers traces of James Agee, Dante, Flaubert, Norman Mailer, and Jessie Weston. In all, Crews covers 11 of McCarthy’s works, including the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men and most of his published output, save only the novel All the Pretty Horses, the play The Sunset Limited, and the screenplay The Counselor. While Crews engages in yeoman’s work here, he produces only a few revelations (such as that the 17th-century mystic Jacob Boehme deeply influenced McCarthy’s Western magnum opus Blood Meridian). Crews’s straightforward and unremarkable reference work will appeal largely to McCarthy’s most devoted fans. (Sept.)