# Why Do Cormac McCarthy’s Books Exist? — Sam Buntz

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: The Uses and Abuses of History](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/why-do-cormac-mccarthys-books-exist
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Sam Buntz
- **Original Source**: [The Dispatch](https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/dispatch-culture/cormac-mccarthy-evil-violence/) (31 October 2026) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

## Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

As with Robert Caro, Cormac McCarthy is another writer I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. I’ve heard him described as America’s foremost chronicler of evil, and his work gave us one of the greatest movies ever made, the Coen brothers’ *No Country for Old Men*.

I came across this essay by Sam Buntz in *The Dispatch*’s culture newsletter, put together with Valerie Pavilonis and Alex Demas, reviewing Tracy Daugherty’s new biography, *Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited*. Much of the review didn’t speak to me, but two things stood out. The first is that no famous person can withstand the intense scrutiny of history, critics and biographers. Everyone has quirks; everyone has good and bad in them. In McCarthy’s case, that means his many affairs, his relationship with Augusta Britt, which began when she was 17 and he was 43, and friends who fell somewhere on the gray spectrum of morality.

The second is that this same man was deeply concerned with what it means to live a good life. He wrestled with profound moral questions about what it means to be human and to be good, much in the vein of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the person he reportedly admired most; his personal library held 142 books by or about the philosopher, many of them annotated. That’s what stayed with me most. McCarthy once told his son:

> You were born a good person. I had to work hard to become one.

And isn’t that the case for all of us?

All in all, an interesting essay. I can’t wait to read all of McCarthy’s books. Why does God curse me to live on this earth with only 24 hours in a day, as opposed to 28 or 32? I do not understand.

## Verbatim Excerpt (p. 6, matched word for word)

> I fear that people are going to be put off from McCarthy by the biography—not only because of the already-known revelations about his relationship with Augusta Britt. Thereʼs the suggestion that McCarthy may have committed credit card fraud when he was younger, that he slept with some of his friendsʼ wives in the sleazy and swinging ʼ70s, and so on and so forth. All this gives the impression of young McCarthy as louche and unscrupulous. But if you read other writings about McCarthy, like the aforementioned Smithsonian profile, you emerge with a different picture. He was someone constantly, feverishly engaged on an intellectual level and also, at least in later life, concerned with his moral condition and reformation. According to the Vanity Fair piece on his relationship with Britt, McCarthy once told his son John Francis, “The difference between you and me is that you were born a good person. I had to work hard to become one.”

## Wikipedia Entities & Concepts

- [Ludwig Wittgenstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein): Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austro-British philosopher who worked in logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.
- [Gnosticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism): Gnosticism is a collection of different religious and philosophical ideas and systems that fully developed by the mid-second century among sects of early Christianity and other faiths.
- [Cormac McCarthy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy): Cormac McCarthy was an American author who wrote twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western, post-apocalyptic, and Southern Gothic genres.
- [No Country for Old Men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Country_for_Old_Men): No Country for Old Men is a 2007 American neo-Western crime thriller film written, directed, produced, and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel.