Cormac Mccarthy And Performance

Drawing on Cormac McCarthy's recently opened archive, as well as interviews with several of his collaborators, this book presents the first comprehensive overview of McCarthy's writing for film and theater, as well as film adaptations of his novels.

Cormac McCarthy is renowned as the author of popular and acclaimed novels such as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, and The Road. Throughout his career, however, McCarthy has also invested deeply in writing for film and theater, an engagement with other forms of storytelling that is often overlooked. He is the author of five screenplays and two plays, and he has been significantly involved with three of the seven film adaptations of his work. In this book, Stacey Peebles offers the first extensive overview of this relatively unknown aspect of McCarthy's writing life, including the ways in which other artists have interpreted his work for the stage and screen. Drawing on many primary sources in McCarthy's recently opened archive, as well as interviews, Peebles covers the 1977 televised film The Gardener's Son; McCarthy's unpublished screenplays from the 1980s that became the foundation for his Border Trilogy novels and No Country for Old Men; various successful and unsuccessful productions of his two plays; and all seven film adaptations of his work, including John Hillcoat's The Road (2009) and the Coen brothers' Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Emerging from this narrative is the central importance of tragedy-the rich and varied portrayals of violence and suffering and the human responses to them-in all of McCarthy's work, but especially his writing for theater and film.

Cormac McCarthy told an interviewer for the New York Times Magazine that "books are made out of books," but he has been 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 is well aware of literary tradition, respectful of the canon, and deliberately situating himself in a knowing relationship to precursors. The Wittliff Collection at Texas State University acquired McCarthy's literary archive in 2007. In Books Are Made Out of Books, Michael Lynn Crews thoroughly mines the archive to identify nearly 150 writers and thinkers that McCarthy himself references 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. For each work, Crews identifies the authors, artists, or other cultural figures that McCarthy references; 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—impossible to undertake before the opening of the archive—vastly expands our understanding of how one of America's foremost authors has engaged with the ideas, images, metaphors, and language of other thinkers and made them his own.

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle). • From the bestselling author of The Passenger A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The second volume of the award-winning Border Trilogy—From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road—fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning—a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

This overview of McCarthy’s published work to date, including: the short stories he published as a student, his novels, stage play and TV film script, locates him as a icocolastic writer, engaged in deconstructing America’s vision of itself as a nation with an exceptionalist role in the world. Introductory chapters outline his personal background and the influences on his early years in Tennessee whilst each of his works is dealt with in a separate chapter listed in chronological order of publication.

From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road comes a taut, expansively imagined drama about four generations of an American family. The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world." Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken—or dishonored—the family trade, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.