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

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 McCarthys 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 Crews organizes the references into chapters devoted to McCarthys published works, the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, and McCarthys correspondence. This updated edition now examines McCarthys 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 McCarthys 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 McCarthys literary influences vastly expands our understanding of how one of Americas foremost authors engaged with the ideas, images, metaphors, and language of other thinkers and made them his own.