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King, Daniel Robert. Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author. University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Hardcover. 2З2 pp. $ 42. ISBN: 1621902471.
Reviewed by Scott Yarbrough
Daniel Robert King states that Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author is "about tracking the changes that McCarthy's work as a novelist, his working methods, and the reception of those novels, both inside and outside the publishing industry, have undergone over the course of McCarthy's career." He goes on to note that the book is "part biography, part archival investigation, and part study of print culture" (1). The book is a retrospective study of the majority of McCarthy's novels (one might take exception to the descriptor "prolific," given that William Faulkner wrote nineteen novels, over a hundred stories, and about twenty screenplays in thirty-six years, and McCarthy-nineteen years older than Faulkner at the time of his death-has published ten novels and five plays and screenplays in his own fifty-three year career) informed by the Witliff Collection of archived letters, notes, and drafts at Texas State University and similar materials preserved in Special Collections at the University of Virginia. Since archival materials are largely unavailable for Outer Dark and Child of God, King moves from The Orchard Keeper to Suttree in his chronological consideration. King achieves some of his stated purposes more successfully than he accomplishes others.
King is best when he draws upon the rich correspondence between McCarthy and his first editor, Random House's Albert Erskine (whose earlier authors included William Faulkner). He paints an interesting and complex biographical picture of the apprentice and journeyman McCarthy at work, developing his craft. In this section he follows along the path blazed by Dianne Luce in her article (cited a number of times by King) "Cormac McCarthy and Albert Erskine: The Evolution of a Working Relationship" (2012). We learn, for example, that Erskine played upon his relationship with Cleanth Brooks to help Anne DeLisle, McCarthy's second wife, gain a visa allowing her to emigrate to the United States. We track the growth of their...