The Road to Cormac McCarthy’s Undoing

‘Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited’By Tracy DaughertySt. Martin’s Press, 528 pagesThe recent publication of Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of the author Cormac McCarthy has been both one of the most anticipated publications of 2026 and a curiously damp squib. The reason for the former is that McCarthy, who died in 2023, remains a towering figure in American letters, while his self-perpetuated enigma — virtually no interviews and hardly any television appearances — looks increasingly wise in an era of BookTok and perpetual self-revelation to which lesser authors submit in droves. And the rationale for the latter is that, while Daugherty’s book was being written, an unhelpful Vanity Fair story, written by Vincenzo Barney, spoilt what would have been the biography’s central revelation: That McCarthy began a decades-long affair with Augusta Britt when he was 42 and she was 16. It was this disclosure, which emerged in late 2024, that immediately colored McCarthy’s posthumous reputation. Much as the British poet Philip Larkin found his standing in the notoriously back-biting world of letters compromised a decade after his death by the publication of Andrew Motion’s tell-all biography and his own selected correspondence, so McCarthy has found himself damned by his own actions. And while Daugherty’s biography, perhaps blessedly, has not brought forth a stream of one-time nymphets to be interviewed, or indeed a series of allegations of McCarthy’s sexual peccadilloes, it has established him as a rather different figure from the one he would have wished us to see.Such notoriously spare and brutal novels as “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” appeared to place McCarthy in a tradition stretching back to Faulkner, even perhaps to his hero Melville. But his apparent refusal, when confronted with underage girls, to keep it in his pants took him in an altogether more depressing direction. Like Philip Roth and Woody Allen, McCarthy appears doomed to be regarded by posterity as a dirty old man, rather than a great writer. Many would argue that this is deeply unfair. They have a point. Yet McCarthy spent decades being under-recognized in his own lifetime, despite the enthusiastic, at times almost simpering, support of such authors as Harland Ellison and Saul Bellow. All of them believed that he was a great writer, despite the American book-buying public refusing to acknowledge such a thing. It is ironic that it was 1992’s “All The Pretty Horses” — far from his best, or indeed most typical, novel — that sold in its droves and established his commercial reputation, to go along with the critical kudos he sporadically enjoyed. Film adaptations of “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road” helped; a bewildering Ridley Scott adaptation of his original screenplay “The Counselor” did not, despite a starry cast. But by then he was sufficiently lionized to be immortalized on a metaphorical Mount Rushmore alongside his literary peers. Whether or not he died with his fingers crossed, McCarthy must have known that the Britt revelations would be reputationally disastrous when they emerged, and so it has proved. Mr. Daugherty’s biography, which has deservedly attracted favorable reviews, hedges its bets as to whether its subject is still going to be as highly regarded in a decade or two as he currently is. Certainly, the curse of Philip Roth hangs heavily upon contemporary American biography now. Not only did Blake Bailey’s life of Roth draw criticism for apparently being too favorable to its subject, but – in an irony that the subject would probably have enjoyed, Mr. Bailey ended up being accused of sexual misconduct himself and the book’s publisher Norton cancelled publication, only for it to be picked up by the opportunistic indie Skyhorse. Roth’s crime, such as it was, was to have been a class A brute to the women in his life, most notably his second wife, the actress Claire Bloom. McCarthy’s greatest failing, according to the new biography, was a lordly level of personal withdrawal that meant that nobody could ever get close to him and discover the myriad secrets that he was undoubtedly hiding. And it is far from impossible that there are still skeletons lurking in the closet that will emerge over the coming years, all of which will reinforce the sense that McCarthy was A Bad Man. Speaking as someone who has always tried to view the work on its own terms rather than tainted by the life — admittedly, not always an easy task — I have to hope that the long-mooted film of McCarthy’s 1985 masterpiece “Blood Meridian,” which is said to be directed by “The Road”’s John Hillcoat, will get made and will bring his justified reputation as a novelist back into focus. Yet I am also worried that the toxicity that has been swirling around the author for the past couple of years is likely to scare off financiers and actors alike.Should this happen, and McCarthy’s standing slowly descends into the gutter, we will see a new and chilling phenomenon: posthumous cancellation. I fear that he will not be the last example of this, either.

The Road to Cormac McCarthy’s Undoing

The Road to Cormac McCarthy’s Undoing

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