Author Cormac McCarthy had relationship with teen when he was 42: Vanity Fair

On Nov 20, American magazine Vanity Fair published a bombshell article revealing that Cormac McCarthy, one of the United States' most celebrated and enigmatic novelists, had a relationship with a girl he met when he was 42 and she was 16.

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She was a foster child who felt so unsafe at home, she often carried a gun and used the pool area at the motel where he was staying to shower.

The revelations in the article stunned many fans of the famously inscrutable author, but did not come as a surprise to McCarthy's close friends or the tight-knit community of scholars who have studied his life and work.

McCarthy's relationship with Ms. Augusta Britt lasted nearly until he died at age 89 in June 2023, and came up in his letters over the years.

What left many scholars surprised, and unconvinced, was the notion asserted in Vanity Fair that Ms. Britt was the key inspiration for some of McCarthy's most memorable characters and that she profoundly shaped other aspects of his work, including his obsession with horses, firearms and the vulnerable young women who suffer violence and heartbreak.

Dr. Dianne Luce, who has written several books about McCarthy, said she and another McCarthy scholar, the late Dr. Edwin Arnold, learnt about his relationship with Ms. Britt around 40 years ago, during an interview with a friend of McCarthy's.

Over the years, she saw the relationship come up in the author's letters to his literary friends, among them Robert Coles, Guy Davenport and Mark Morrow.

Their connection was long-lasting, but Dr. Luce said she believes that many of the Vanity Fair article's claims about Ms. Britt's singular influence on McCarthy's work were overblown.

The story's author, Mr. Vincenzo Barney, depicts Ms. Britt as a model for characters in 10 of his books, including Wanda and Harrogate in Suttree (1979), Alejandra in All The Pretty Horses (1992), Carla Jean in No Country For Old Men (2005), and Alicia Western in The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris (2022), among other characters.

"I'm deeply skeptical of most of these assertions about how she shows up in his work," Dr. Luce said.