Books Are Made Out of Books

A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences

Michael Lynn Crews

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781477330845
• eBook ISBN: 9781477330869
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 Crews organizes the references into chapters devoted to McCarthy's published works, the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, and McCarthy's correspondence.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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction: Books Out of Books
• Chapter 2. The Orchard Keeper
• Chapter 3. Outer Dark
• Chapter 4. Child of God
• Chapter 5. The Gardener’s Son
• Chapter 6. Suttree
• Chapter 7. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
• Chapter 8. The Stonemason
• Chapter 9. The Crossing
• Chapter 10. Cities of the Plain
• Chapter 11. The Road
• Chapter 12. Whales and Men
• Chapter 13. Correspondence
• Chapter 14. The Passenger
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index