A long-kept secret is now public. Will it change Cormac McCarthy’s legacy?

This week Vanity Fair published a shocking article revealing that Cormac McCarthy, one of the country’s most famous and enigmatic novelists, was in a relationship with a girl he met when he was 42, and she was 16, a foster child, who felt so unsafe at home She often carried a gun and used the pool area of ​​the motel where he was staying to shower.

The revelations in the article stunned many fans of the notoriously inscrutable author, but were no surprise to close friends of McCarthy or the close community of scholars who have studied his life and work. McCarthy’s relationship with Augusta Britt lasted almost until his death in 2023 and came up in his letters over the years.

What surprised, rather than convinced, many scholars was the view put forward in Vanity Fair that Britt was the primary inspiration for some of McCarthy’s most memorable characters—and that she profoundly shaped other aspects of his work, including recurring themes and motifs, even his obsession, in his Books are about horses, guns, and the vulnerable young women who suffer violence and heartbreak.

Dianne C. Luce, who has written several books about McCarthy, said she and another McCarthy scholar, Edwin T. Arnold, learned of McCarthy’s relationship with Britt about 40 years ago during an interview with a friend of McCarthy’s. Over the years, she saw the relationship come up in the author’s letters to his literary friends, including Robert Coles, Guy Davenport and Mark Morrow.

Their connection was long-lasting, but Luce said she believes many of the Vanity Fair article’s claims about Britt’s unique influence on McCarthy’s work were exaggerated. In the story, author Vincenzo Barney portrays Britt as a model for characters in ten of his books, including Wanda and Harrogate in Suttree, Carla Jean in No Country for Old Men, and Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses. ” and Alicia Western in “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” among others.

“I am deeply skeptical of most of these claims as expressed in his work,” Luce said.

Luce said in particular that she questioned the claim that McCarthy based the characters of Wanda and Harrogate in “Suttree” on Britt because McCarthy had written a draft of the novel featuring those characters years before they met.