This chapter focuses on the archival documents relevant to a study of McCarthy’s works completed in the 1970s: the novels Child of God and Suttree, and the teleplay The Gardener’s Son. It surveys the collections of correspondence available for these years, but concentrates primarily on McCarthy’s typescripts, identifying the relationships among the key drafts and highlighting some of the insights to be gained from the archives about the genesis, composition, revisions, and editing of these works. It shows how Child of God took its genesis from the second draft stage of Outer Dark when McCarthy repurposed material from one book for the other. For The Gardener’s Son, it surveys the documents available in the papers of McCarthy, film director Richard Pearce, and the Ecco Press Records, and outlines the changes which McCarthy made in the teleplay between its second draft and the shooting script. The Suttree section concentrates on material deleted from the novel before publication, either on McCarthy’s initiative or in response to his editor’s plea for compression. It argues that the deleted scenes saved by McCarthy in a separate folder focus primarily on the transformation of oral to literary narratives and emphasize Suttree as a writer in the making.

This chapter surveys currently available archives of drafts and correspondence relevant to a study of the works McCarthy wrote wholly or in part during his Tennessee years. It suggests broad guidelines for doing archival research on McCarthy before focusing on his first two novels, The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, for which the most important archives are McCarthy’s papers and those of Random House editor Albert Erskine. For this period we currently have few letters with correspondents other than McCarthy’s editors; but the archives provide a rich introduction to his working practices. They offer important glimpses of McCarthy’s early sense of confidence about his writing, his aesthetic aims and principles, and his developing relationship with Erskine, who edited his novels for twenty years. The chapter describes the relationships among the key drafts and highlights some of the insights to be gained from the archives about the genesis, composition, revisions, and editing of these works. McCarthy’s revisions of The Orchard Keeper, first for Lawrence Bensky and then for Erskine, are especially revealing of his approach to revising for another reader. The first and early drafts of Outer Dark provide rare insights into McCarthy’s compositional strategies and practices.

There are only a handful of repositories in the United States that hold archival resources relating to the author, Cormac McCarthy, and even fewer containing original correspondence. This chapter identifies key collections of letters available to researchers, and provides a guide for navigating these archives. With emphases on personal and professional correspondence, I provide an overview of McCarthy material in the Albert Erskine Papers at the University of Virginia; the Cormac McCarthy Papers at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University; and the Random House Archive at Columbia University, as well as a few smaller collections.

This chapter traces McCarthy’s place on the global map of translations, examining its timeline and various factors that played a role in leading to the first publication of each of his works in foreign languages. A number of staged performances of The Sunset Limited in a set of countries are also mentioned. The chapter finally examines the cultural reception of McCarthy in a few countries and lists some of the novels or works in other media that have used McCarthy’s work as a source of inspiration.