Cormac's Library

For a New York Times bestselling adventure travel writer, an invitation to visit Cormac McCarthy’s eclectic home library in Santa Fe turns into a raucous quest to understand one of America’s greatest modern writers and the mythic Southwest he called home.

It all started with an offhand comment at a boozy Louisiana book festival. Did Grant know Cormac McCarthy had a personal library of 20,000 volumes covering every conceivable subject, from quantum physics and schizophrenia to Uruguayan paleontology and The Biology of the Naked Mole Rat? He was obsessed with Wittgenstein, Hegel was his light pleasure reading, and he had eighty books on violins, not to mention dozens more on Irish country homes, antique firearms, and Formula 1 racing. Perhaps Grant should pay a visit to Cormac’s home, grab a whiskey with his brother, hear some stories from his son. So began a rollicking adventure into the life and afterlife of an expert stonemason, fur trapper, pool hustler, marksman, vintage car mechanic, and recently deceased great American novelist. As curiosity grew into obsession, Grant soon found himself driving cross-country to gab with the supposed recluse’s oldest friends and favorite relatives, including a flirtatious ex-wife in Florida, a literature-loving movie star in Montecito, a bipolar nudist in Tucson, and a bar owner who calls himself God. And yet the more Grant learned about this polymathic genius (and his bizarre habits), the more McCarthy came to seem like a character out of one of his own books...and the more Grant felt himself pulled into what felt like the last great unwritten Cormac McCarthy novel. Bursting with irrepressible dark humor and peopled by a motley cast of delightful eccentrics, Cormac’s Library is a boisterous journey into myth, memory, and one of our most beloved—and controversial—literary minds.