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

Crews, Michael Lynn

ISBN 10: 1477330844 / ISBN 13: 9781477330845

Published by University of Texas Press, 2024

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1477330844
• ISBN 13: 9781477330845
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that “books are made out of books,” but he was famously unwilling to discuss how his own writing draws on the works of other writers. Yet his novels and plays masterfully appropriate and allude to an extensive range of literary works, demonstrating that McCarthy was well aware of literary tradition and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors.

In Books Are Made Out of Books, Michael Lynn Crews thoroughly mines McCarthy’s literary archive to identify over 150 writers and thinkers that McCarthy referenced in early drafts, marginalia, notes, and correspondence. Crews organizes the references into chapters devoted to McCarthy’s published works, the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, and McCarthy’s correspondence. This updated edition now examines McCarthy’s final publications: the novel The Passenger and its play-like coda Stella Maris.

For each work, Crews identifies authors, artists, or other cultural figures that McCarthy referenced; gives the source of the reference in McCarthy’s papers; provides context for the reference as it appears in the archives; and explains the significance of the reference to the novel or play that McCarthy was working on. This groundbreaking exploration of McCarthy’s literary influences vastly expands our understanding of how one of America’s foremost authors engaged with the ideas, images, metaphors, and language of other thinkers and made them his own.

About the Author

Michael Lynn Crews is an associate professor of English at Regent University. He specializes in American and contemporary literature.