McCarthy had moved to Santa Fe with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their young son John in 2001. He found the town off-puttingly liberal, moneyed and artsy, and moved there for one reason only: His great friend Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, invited him to join the Santa Fe Institute, serving as a sort of in-house literary intellectual. This elite scientific think tank, co-founded by Gell-Mann, brings together some of the world’s most brilliant minds to research complex interconnected systems. McCarthy had long preferred the company of scientists to that of literary people, and he delighted in the high-flying conversations at the institute. He went there nearly every day to work on his writing and kept up with all the institute’s scientific research.
[---]
Out came the entire canon of Western literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the best novelists, poets and essayists of the 1970s, nearly all in cheap, worn, paperback editions. “These are the books that he read in his 20s and 30s and maybe into his 40s, and he was broke that whole time,” said Dennis. “Once he got money, Cormac bought all his books in hardback if possible, and for the last 40 years of his life he read almost no fiction at all.”
- More Here
No comments:
Post a Comment