A Long-Held Secret is Now Public. Will it Alter Cormac McCarthy’s Legacy?

This week, Vanity Fair published a bombshell article revealing that Cormac McCarthy, one of the country’s most celebrated and enigmatic novelists, had a relationship with a girl he met when he was 42 and she was 16, 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 close friends of McCarthy’s or the tight-knit community of scholars who have studied his life and work. McCarthy’s relationship with Augusta Britt lasted nearly until his death in 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 Britt was the key inspiration for some of McCarthy’s most memorable characters — and that she profoundly shaped other aspects of his work, including recurring themes and motifs, even his obsession with horses, firearms and the vulnerable young women who suffer violence and heartbreak in his books.

Dianne C. Luce, who has written several books about McCarthy, said she and another McCarthy scholar, Edwin T. Arnold, learned about McCarthy’s relationship with 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 Luce said she believes that many of the Vanity Fair article’s claims about Britt’s singular influence on McCarthy’s work were overblown. In the story, the author, Vincenzo Barney, depicts Britt as a model for characters in 10 of his books, including Wanda and Harrogate in “Suttree,” Carla Jean in “No Country for Old Men,” Alejandra in “All the Pretty Horses” and Alicia Western in “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” among other characters.

“I’m deeply skeptical of most of these assertions about how she shows up in his work,” Luce said.

In particular, Luce said she questioned the claim that McCarthy had based the characters of Wanda and Harrogate in “Suttree” on Britt, because McCarthy wrote a drafts of the novel with those characters years before meeting her.