Chapter 25 - The Archives and the Tennessee Years, I: The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark

Summary

This chapter surveys currently available archives of drafts and correspondence relevant to a study of the works McCarthy wrote wholly or in part during his Tennessee years. It suggests broad guidelines for doing archival research on McCarthy before focusing on his first two novels, The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, for which the most important archives are McCarthy’s papers and those of Random House editor Albert Erskine. For this period we currently have few letters with correspondents other than McCarthy’s editors; but the archives provide a rich introduction to his working practices. They offer important glimpses of McCarthy’s early sense of confidence about his writing, his aesthetic aims and principles, and his developing relationship with Erskine, who edited his novels for twenty years. The chapter describes the relationships among the key drafts and highlights some of the insights to be gained from the archives about the genesis, composition, revisions, and editing of these works. McCarthy’s revisions of The Orchard Keeper, first for Lawrence Bensky and then for Erskine, are especially revealing of his approach to revising for another reader. The first and early drafts of Outer Dark provide rare insights into McCarthy’s compositional strategies and practices.