Cormac McCarthy's personal library goes online with 18,725 titles
Cormac McCarthy's Library
The University of Tennessee has digitized Cormac McCarthy's personal library, now searchable online. The catalog lists 18,725 items, from William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon to a physics math textbook and a guide to fast reading. Some entries are annotated, offering a window into the novelist's reading habits and intellectual world.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 18725
- fallinditch
A random book from the collection looks interesting: Correction by Thomas Bernhard.
Described as “a mesmerising, claustrophobic novel about obsession, genius and the impossibility of perfection. Structured in two enormous, uninterrupted blocks of prose, it follows an unnamed narrator reconstructing the life of his dead friend Roithamer, before becoming absorbed in his manuscripts. Sentences spiral, repeat and contradict themselves, creating the sensation of being trapped inside an endlessly turning mind. Roithamer is modelled partly on Ludwig Wittgenstein, particularly his intellectual austerity and obsessive pursuit of perfection, reflected in his design of an extraordinary house for his sister. A darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting masterpiece.”
Adding to my ‘want to read’ list now …
A review: https://proletarianpolyglot.substack.com/p/correction-by-tho...
- wrongtrousers
No mention of Augusta Britt on the about page?
- dang
Related:
Cormac McCarthy's personal library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45444694 - Oct 2025 (138 comments)
- maxweylandt
Something I didn't expect -- quite a lot of banal stuff in there in there (in addition to the many known and I'm sure underappreciated greats). You hear about these impressive libraries all the time; good to know at least some of it might be '1001 golf courses to play' and similar pre-internet listicles.
- lukewrites
Happy to see how many titles by Gore Vidal he owned - and annotated.