Western American Literature

Cormac McCarthy once stated in an interview for The New York Times Magazine that "The ugly fact is books are made out of books." McCarthy is reticent, however, about discussing what writers or books are on his mind while composing his works. Fortunately, the opening of McCarthy's manuscripts in 2009 verifies many scholars' assumptions and makes further exploration possible. The manuscripts, housed in the Wittliff Collections of the Alkek Library of Texas State University at San Marcos, contains ninety-eight boxes, each holding several folders. Based on archival investigation, Michael Lynn Crews's Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy's Literary Influences is a groundbreaking contribution to exploring McCarthy's literary influences. Crews, like an archaeologist with magnifying glass in hand, mines Cormac McCarthy's archives and unearths nearly 150 writers who have influenced McCarthy.

Crews organizes the references into chapters respectively devoted to most of McCarthy's published works (except All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Sunset Limited), the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, and McCarthy's correspondence. In each chapter the alphabetized entries correspond to the names of writers, artists, and thinkers found in the archives. Each entry describes the location of the reference in the archives by identifying the box and folder in which it is contained. Crews's research process mainly involves three steps: first, identifying and tracking down the source of the reference in McCarthy's papers; then investigating the relationship between the quotation and McCarthy's published works; and finally, exploring the significance of that connection to the work McCarthy was composing. Through studying [End Page 391] the relationship between McCarthy's influences and his published work, Crews finds that McCarthy skillfully appropriates the ideas, images, metaphors, and language of other writers, making them his own by seamlessly weaving them into the fabric of his works. He draws conclusions about McCarthy's approach to composition, arguing that the fact that "McCarthy's borrowings from novelists, poets, writers, and thinkers do not feel artificial is a testament to his artistic abilities" (14).

As Crews claims, this book has "three gold mines: Suttree, Blood Meridian, and the three drafts of the unpublished screenplay Whales and Men" (7). For Suttree (1979), Crews excavates forty-seven literary influences, which "reveal a novelist fully engaged with literary and philosophical precursors" (48). The chapter devoted to McCarthy's masterpiece Blood Meridian (1985) is another significant compendium necessary to the scholarly study of the novel after John Sepich's Notes on Blood Meridian (1993, 2008). Crews analyzes how the archives point to several sources for McCarthy's transforming a more traditional Western into a novel of ideas. In examining McCarthy's unpublished screenplay Whales and Men, Crews finds that "McCarthy's marginal scribblings and revisions testify to how seriously he took this work" (258). There are also other mines where readers can find their own treasures. In McCarthy's early draft of Child of God (1973) Crews finds that McCarthy's referencing of filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock "highlights McCarthy's interest in film" (37) and provides encouragement for scholars to further study McCarthy's use of film's narrative powers. Crews also makes an initial exploration of Allen Ginsberg's influence on McCarthy while composing The Gardener' Son (1976). He also provides an insightful analysis of how Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac influenced McCarthy's handling of the depiction of the wolf in the first section of The Crossing (1994). In researching McCarthy's correspondence with the rare book dealer and publisher J. Howard Woolmer, Crews discovers fifteen references to such writers as Thomas Hardy, Henry Miller, Milan Kundera, and Elaine Scarry.

This book is a marvelous and essential tool for McCarthy scholarship. It is remarkable for the completeness of its sources, its meticulous scholarly research, and its accessibility. Aided by solid [End Page 392] documentation, Crews situates his...