Richard B Woodward, who has known McCarthy for 30 years, on the reclusive author’s love of scientific thinking, and why he will publish two novels in two months after a 16-year wait
• Read an exclusive extract from Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger
For the last 20 years or so, the most likely place to find the publicity-shy novelist-playwright-screenwriter Cormac McCarthy would be at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Co-founded in 1984 by Murray Gell-Mann, the 1969 recipient of the Nobel prize in physics, SFI is a thinktank for maverick brainiacs, a flexible category that, in the judgment of the late polymath Gell-Mann, perfectly described McCarthy, his friend and MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner.
Until recently on many weekdays, the writer could be heard at SFI, clattering away on his portable typewriter from behind his office door. An affable member of this elite community, with no specific tasks to perform, he would regularly emerge for afternoon tea or attend talks by SFI scholars and visiting academics on topics that interested him, such as complex systems theory or quantum computing.
