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.
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.
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