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著者の詳細Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres. McCarthy's fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), was on Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language books published since 1923. For All the Pretty Horses (1992), he won both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God have also been adapted as motion pictures, while Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute short. McCarthy won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). In 2010, The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying". Writing careerRandom House published McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965. McCarthy decided to send the manuscript to Random House because "it was the only publisher [he] had heard of". At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who had been William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy's work for the next 20 years. In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania hoping to visit Ireland. While on the ship, he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the Sylvania as a singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968). Afterward he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was published to generally favorable reviews. In 1969, the couple moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a barn, which McCarthy renovated, doing the stonework himself. Here he wrote his next book, Child of God (1973), based on actual events. Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979, his novel Suttree, which he had been writing on and off for 20 years, was finally published. Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, McCarthy wrote his next novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985). The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles; in a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). In 1992, an article in The New York Times noted that none of McCarthy's novels published to that point had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies, and that "for most of his career, he did not even have an agent". McCarthy finally received widespread recognition after the publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), when it won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing the Border Trilogy. In the midst of this trilogy came, c. 1994, The Stonemason (first performed in 1995), McCarthy's second dramatic work. He had previously written a film for PBS, The Gardener's Son, which aired January 6, 1977. McCarthy's next book, No Country for Old Men (2005), was originally conceived as a screenplay before being turned into a novel. It stayed with the Western setting and themes yet moved to a more contemporary period. The Coen brothers adapted it into a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awards globally. McCarthy's next book, The Road (2006), won international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; a 2009 film adaptation was directed by John Hillcoat, written by Joe Penhall, and starred Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Also in 2006, McCarthy published the play The Sunset Limited; he adapted it as a screenplay for an HBO film (airdate February 2011). It was directed and executive produced by Tommy Lee Jones, who also starred opposite Samuel L. Jackson. In 2012, McCarthy sold his original screenplay The Counselor to Nick Wechsler, Paula Mae Schwartz, and Steve Schwartz, who had previously produced the film adaptation of McCarthy's novel The Road. Ridley Scott directed, and the cast included Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Cameron Diaz. Production finished in 2012, and it was released on October 25, 2013, to polarized critical reception. In a 2017 essay titled "The Kekulé Problem", McCarthy analyzed a dream of August Kekulé's as a model of the unconscious mind and the origins of language. Kekulé claimed to have discovered the ring-like shape of a benzene molecule after dreaming of an "ouroboros". Current projectsThe Guardian reported in 2009 that McCarthy was at work on three new novels. One is set in 1980s New Orleans and follows a young man as he deals with the suicide of his sister. According to McCarthy, this will feature a prominent female character. He also states that the new novel is "long". ArchivesThe comprehensive archive of McCarthy's personal papers is preserved at the Wittliff collections, Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas. The McCarthy papers consists of 98 boxes (46 linear feet). The acquisition of the Cormac McCarthy Papers resulted from years of ongoing conversations between McCarthy and Southwestern Writers Collection founder, Bill Wittliff, who negotiated the proceedings. The Southwestern Writers Collection/Wittliff collections also holds The Wolmer Collection of Cormac McCarthy, which consists of letters between McCarthy and bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer, and four other related collections. Spanish dialogue in McCarthy's Western novelsIn "Mojado Reverso; or, a Reverse Wetback: On John Grady Cole's Mexican Ancestry in All the Pretty Horses," Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes: "John Grady Cole is a native speaker of Spanish. This is also the case of several other important characters in the Border Trilogy, including Billy Parhnam (sic), John Grady's mother (and possibly his grandfather and brothers), and perhaps Jimmy Blevins, each of whom are speakers of Spanish who were ostensibly born in the US political space into families with what are generally considered English-speaking surnames…This is also the case of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian." The Cormac McCarthy Society has made PDF documents comprising Spanish-to-English translations of dialogue for four of McCarthy's Western novels: Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Writing styleMcCarthy makes sparse use of punctuation, even replacing most commas with "and" (a polysyndeton). He told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons. He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks". Erik Hage notes that McCarthy's dialogue also often lacks attribution, but that "[s]omehow...the reader remains oriented as to who is speaking". His attitude to punctuation dates to some editing work he did for a professor of English while he was enrolled at the University of Tennessee, when he stripped out much of the punctuation in the book being edited, which pleased the professor. McCarthy also edited fellow Santa Fe Institute Fellow W. Brian Arthur's influential article "Increasing Returns and the New World of Business", published in the Harvard Business Review in 1996, removing commas from the text. He has also done copy-editing work for physicists Lawrence M. Krauss and Lisa Randall. InspirationIn one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy revealed that he respects only authors who "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not rate with him. "I don't understand them ... To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange", he said. Oprah Winfrey selected McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy told Winfrey that he does not know any writers and much prefers the company of scientists. During the interview, he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his son was the inspiration for The Road. Regarding his own literary constraints when writing novels, McCarthy said he is "not a fan of some of the Latin American writers, magical realism. You know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible." As reported in Wired magazine, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, which he had owned since buying it in a Knoxville pawnshop for $50 in 1963, was put up for auction at Christie's in 2009. He estimates he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of "blowing out the dust with a service station hose". The Olivetti was auctioned on December 4, 2009, and the auction house estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500. Its replacement is another Olivetti, bought for McCarthy by his friend John Miller for $11. Personal lifeMcCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, one of six children of Charles Joseph McCarthy and Gladys Christina (née McGrail) McCarthy. In 1937, his family relocated to Knoxville, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The family first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941 had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville (this latter house burned in 2009). Among his childhood friends was Jim Long (1930–2012), who would later be depicted as J-Bone in his novel Suttree. McCarthy attended St. Mary's Parochial School and Knoxville Catholic High School, and was an altar boy at Knoxville's Church of the Immaculate Conception. He attended the University of Tennessee from 1951–52 and 1957–59 but never graduated. While at UT he published two stories in The Phoenix and was awarded the Ingram Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. For purposes of his writing career, McCarthy decided to change his first name from Charles to Cormac to avoid association with famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy, changing it to Cormac after famous Irish high kings Cormac mac Airt and Cormac mac Cuilennáin. After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, they "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There they had a son, Cullen, in 1962. While caring for the baby and tending to the chores of the house, Lee was asked by Cormac to also get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching. Cormac McCarthy is fluent in Spanish and lived in Ibiza, Spain, in the 1960s and later settled in El Paso, Texas, where he lived for nearly 20 years. In an interview with Richard B. Woodward from The New York Times, "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life. 'The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,' he says. 'If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.'". In the late 1990s, McCarthy moved to the Tesuque, New Mexico area, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. McCarthy and Winkley divorced in 2006. Family
BibliographyNovels
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