The latest edition of the Cormac McCarthy Society Conference, taking place in downtown Knoxville this weekend, coincides with an enormous shift in the field of McCarthy studies. 

The Cormac McCarthy Library Project is cataloging the approximately 20,000 books McCarthy accumulated during his life.

For decades, one of the key widely accepted facts about McCarthy, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who spent most of his childhood and young adulthood in Knoxville before lighting out for the West and literary fame, was his reticence. He was famously unwilling to sit for interviews or appear at literary events, and he almost never discussed his work or his creative process in public. When he did, he seldom gave anything meaningful away.

The strict control McCarthy maintained over his public self, though, lasted only as long as he was alive. Since his death in June 2023, there has been a sense that tons of new information will surface, eventually, from McCarthy’s own archives and from the memories of those who knew him. 

There’s been one major posthumous revelation so far: Barney Vincenzo’s fascinatingly awful 2024 Vanity Fair article about Augusta Britt, who began a sexual relationship with McCarthy when he was 42 and she was still a teenager. Most of the revelations are still to come, however, and the big work of reevaluating and reckoning with McCarthy and his work is in its early stages. 

This is the second conference since McCarthy died. But the previous one, in 2024, took place so soon after his death that scholars still hadn’t started addressing the new environment they were in. 

“It was still so recent that the landscape hadn’t really changed much yet,” said Stacey Peebles, a professor of English and film studies at Centre College in Kentucky and president of the Cormac McCarthy Society, which was founded in 1995. “So this is really the first one where there’s a number of projects that have come out that might not have been possible when he was still alive.”

One of those projects is Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty, who will speak at a lunch on Saturday. A Legacy Revisited, published this week, is the first full-length biography of McCarthy. (Another biography, by McCarthy’s friend Laurence Gonzalez, is scheduled to be released next year.) 

Based on reviews, Daugherty presents a portrait of a publicity-shy but hardly reclusive writer, full of big ideas and committed to his art. Daugherty’s bio also reportedly depicts a less savory side of McCarthy: self-absorbed, unreliable, unfaithful and politically reactionary. Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited “is good enough, at least for a first crack at McCarthy,” Dwight Garner writes in the New York Times. “It divulges a lot of new information, dispels myths, has strong set pieces and does a bloodhound’s job of tracing the overlaps between the life and the work.”

The other notable new endeavor to be presented at the conference is the Cormac McCarthy Library Project, a massive online database cataloging the approximately 20,000 books McCarthy accumulated during his life. Peebles, who is leading the project, will discuss the database at a Saturday-morning panel. 

“Everybody who read him had always wondered about his own reading, because his books make so many allusions to so many different things — not just other literature but philosophy and history and all this different stuff,” said Peebles. “And nobody ever really knew. He would drop tiny hints in interviews and maybe in the notes of his manuscripts, but otherwise, it was a black box.” 

In an online interview after McCarthy’s death, Peebles was asked about McCarthy’s personal collection of books. 

“I said, ‘I have no idea, but I hope it gets preserved,’” Peebles recalled. “McCarthy’s brother, Dennis McCarthy, heard the interview, and then he emailed me. Cormac had, Dennis guessed, something like 30,000 books. They were in his house and in storage lockers in two different cities. He said, ‘We just don’t know what to do with them. Do you have any ideas?’”

Over the course of a year, from 2024 to the summer of 2025, Peebles and volunteers from the Society made multiple visits to McCarthy’s home in Santa Fe to capture information on each book. (Journalist Richard Grant tagged along during the summer of 2024 and wrote about the project for Smithsonian last year. He’s delivering the keynote address for the conference at the East Tennessee History Center today at 6 p.m. It’s free and open to the public.)

The final total was closer to 20,000 than 30,000, but it’s still a huge collection: novels and short stories and books on every imaginable subject from history, philosophy, math and science to the outdoors, architecture and design, cars and guns. 

Using a third-party platform, the researchers captured basic information about each book for the database: title, author, publisher, ISBN, a cover image and description, if available. 

“Then we asked, what would McCarthy’s readers want to know?” Peebles said. “You want to know if it’s annotated? You want to know where it was? He kept a bunch of books in storage lockers in El Paso. When he moved to Santa Fe in 2001, he never bothered to go get the rest of those books. But the location can tell you something about when he used them or when he acquired them.” 

They kept adding details to the database: Was the book sent to a university collection, or did someone in the family hang onto it? Was the book wrapped or in an unopened shipping box? How did it fit into McCarthy’s own personal classification system (H for history, AMG for automobiles and guns)? Was there an inscription or other unusual detail? Was the book annotated? 

What this all adds up to is a detailed cross-section of a major fiction writer’s input. It may not be an actual X-ray of McCarthy’s interior life, but it is a fascinating interconnected record of the material that informed it. 

The database is almost ready for a soft launch. It probably won’t be available for public use before the end of the conference on Saturday, but the official launch is imminent, Peebles said. 

The books themselves were headed to three different locations. A small number of the math and science books went to the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary think-tank McCarthy was associated with during the last decades of his life. McCarthy made notes in pencil in some of his books, with comments that range from curious to cantankerous. Those books have been sent to Texas State University in San Marcos, where the rest of McCarthy’s personal papers are held. The overwhelming majority of the collection, about 18,000 books, is being held at the University of Tennessee, which McCarthy attended without graduating. 

“I took a group to Santa Fe in April, and we packed up three tractor-trailer loads of books and had them shipped back to Knoxville,” said Jennifer Mezick, associate dean for research, collections and assessment at UT Libraries. “They’re all here on campus right now at Hodges Library being sorted, cleaned and cataloged.” 

Mezick’s team has cataloged about 3,000 books so far. She estimates they’ll complete the process in late 2027, at the earliest. 

CORRECTION: This story has been corrected to identify the university with McCarthy's personal papers as Texas State rather than Texas Tech.