Archive of novelist Cormac McCarthy at Texas State doubles in size after recent acquisition



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Archive of novelist Cormac McCarthy at Texas State doubles in size after recent acquisition

Texas Public Radio | By Fernando Ortiz Jr.
Published October 23, 2024 at 6:01 PM CDT
Fernando Ortiz Jr.
/
TPR
Works by Cormac McCarthy

Texas State University in San Marcos houses the archive of novelist Cormac McCarthy.

Officials announced on Wednesday that a recent acquisition has more than doubled the size of that collection.

In 2007, the famed writer of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road donated his papers to the university's Wittliff Collections.

The archive opened in 2009. McCarthy published his last works, the linked novels The Passenger and Stella Maris, in 2022. He died in 2023 at age 89.

On Wednesday, the university explained in a statement that it has acquired 36 boxes filled with McCarthy's private journals, photos, correspondence, manuscripts of unpublished novels, and research materials that helped him write his works.

The new materials should be available to researchers in late 2025.

"The Wittliff Collections have been a treasure trove for McCarthy scholars," said McCarthy's brother Dennis, who is also the literary executor and who helped acquire the new collection. "With these new materials, you will have an amazingly richer picture for understanding Cormac and his work."

Wittliff Collections Director David Coleman added in the statement that "McCarthy was a famously reticent public figure and very few people realized that he had preserved such extensive records of his own life. This new material will sustain researchers for generations to come."

McCarthy's books have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among many other honors. Several have been adapted into films, including No Country for Old Men and The Road.

Since 2009, scholars, writers and fans from all over the world have traveled to the San Marcos campus to explore the dozens of boxes that make up the archive. The original collection contains material from 1964 to 2007. The recent additions may extend that timeframe into the 2020s.

A guide to the archive is available here.

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