All the Pretty Little Horses

When he was 42, CORMAC MCCARTHY fell in love with a 16-year-old girl he met by a motel pool. AUGUSTA BRITT would go on to become one of the most significant-and secretinspirations in literary history, giving life to dozens of McCarthy's characters across his celebrated novels and Hollywood films. For 47 years, Britt closely guarded her identity and her story. Until now

- VINCENZO BARNEY

I’M ABOUT TO tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse.

This love story may come as a shock, for Cormac McCarthy is one of the most famous American novelists we know the least about. In June 2022, when he died of complications from prostate cancer at the age of 89 surrounded by Cadillacs and Ferraris at his compound in Santa Fe, McCarthy’s hold on literary awareness was at a stage of maximum receptivity. (So was his bank account; sources say he died with tens of millions in assets.) He had just released a dyad of final novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, turning his death half a year later into an eerie consonance. And yet, despite hours of posthumously released interviews with the likes of Werner Herzog and David Krakauer, we still know so little about the man behind the famous Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter.

There are the known years of drinking immortalized in his fourth novel, Suttree, and his efforts to reintroduce wolves into southern Arizona in the ’80s. In 1996, a neighbor pored through his trash in El Paso and found junk mail from the Republican National Committee. For most of his writing career, he was mythically poor, according to several accounts,