Cormac McCarthy’s personal library
In Cormac McCarthy’s living room, books jockey for space with a previously unpublished photo of the novelist, shot by his brother Dennis. Wayne Martin Belger Cormac McCarthy, one of the greatest novelists America has ever produced and one of the most private, had been dead for 13 months when I arrived at his final residence outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a stately old adobe house, two stories high with beam-ends jutting out of the exterior walls, set back from a country road in a valley below the mountains. First built in 1892, the house was expanded and modernized in the 1970s and extensively modified by McCarthy himself, who, it turns out, was a self-taught architect as well as a master of literary fiction. I was invited to the house by two McCarthy scholars who were…
