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 argues that McCarthy’s first four novels, which are lumped together and called his “Tennessee period,” can be characterized by an engagement with the literary attributes of allusion and allegory, particularly allegories of and allusions to hallmarks of Western culture, such as classical drama, Judeo-Christian theology, pastoral idealism, and the symbolic allegory of Romanticism. This chapter further argues that one can see an evolution in these four novels in how McCarthy invokes allegory and allusion, an evolution that progresses from a modernist stance towards industrialism to a wider questioning of the stability of cultural meaning. In the first two novels, this chapter argues, McCarthy uses allusion to signal a simpler time lost in twentieth-century American modernity. In the second two novels, McCarthy uses the literary tropes of allegory and allusion to question meaning and authority more generally, as allusions and even rituals become simulations of meaning and artifacts become empty markers of a past significance that are stripped from their cultural foundation.