Cormac McCarthy spent most of his working life writing on a single blue Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, which he bought secondhand in a Knoxville pawnshop in 1963 for fifty dollars. He used the same machine for nearly five decades, through twelve novels and two screenplays, until a friend bought him a replacement at a Christie's auction in 2009. The original Olivetti, which had produced Blood Meridian, Suttree, the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, sold for more than a quarter of a million dollars to benefit the Santa Fe Institute, where McCarthy spent the last decades of his life.
The story of the typewriter is the whole story of McCarthy's routine in miniature. He chose his tools carefully, kept them for as long as they worked, and arranged his life so that almost nothing else interfered with the work. He didn't give interviews, didn't tour, didn't teach, and didn't socialize with the literary world. The whole routine was a long subtraction. He removed everything that wasn't writing, and what was left became the books.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- Early, though the exact time varied across his life. He was a morning writer who treated the first hours of the day as the only ones worth giving to the work.
- Writing Location
- A long sequence of cheap hotel rooms, rented houses, and one-room apartments throughout the South and Southwest. In his later years, an office at the Santa Fe Institute, where he was the only humanist on a campus full of theoretical physicists and mathematicians.
- Daily Output
- Unknown. He didn't track word counts and didn't talk about productivity. The novels came out at irregular intervals, sometimes years apart.
- Tools
- A blue Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, bought in 1963, used until 2009. Plain paper. A pen for revisions. He distrusted electronic equipment and stayed on the typewriter long after most novelists had switched.
- Famous Ritual
- The wholesale refusal of the literary social circuit. No interviews, no readings, no teaching, no awards ceremonies, no public appearances unless he had no way to avoid them. The routine was protected by the absence of everything else.
- Books Written This Way
- Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men, The Road.
The Olivetti
The blue Lettera 32 was a portable manual typewriter, lightweight enough to carry from one rented room to the next. McCarthy bought it secondhand and never replaced it. He estimated, in the rare 2007 interview he gave Oprah Winfrey, that he'd typed something like five million words on the machine over the years. He sold the original at auction in 2009 for $254,500, all of which went to the Santa Fe Institute, and his friend John Miller bought him a nearly identical replacement at the same auction for $11.
The story is funnier than it sounds, but the underlying point is serious. McCarthy had figured out, very early in his life, what tools the work required. Once he'd figured it out, he stopped looking for better ones. The Olivetti didn't need software updates, didn't crash, didn't have a battery, and didn't tempt him to check his email. It produced one thing, which was words on a page, and it produced them at exactly the speed his thinking ran at. Forty-six years of using the same machine meant that the machine had stopped being equipment and become an extension of his hands.
Most writers churn through tools constantly, switching apps, buying new keyboards, trying different note-taking systems, and the time they spend optimizing the setup is time they aren't spending on the work. McCarthy is the opposite case. He found the right tool, kept it forever, and put all his attention into the prose instead of into the equipment around it. The lesson is portable even if the typewriter isn't. If your current writing setup works, stop trying to improve it. Improve the writing instead.
The Empty Room
For most of his life McCarthy lived in places that other writers would consider barely habitable. Cheap hotel rooms in Knoxville and El Paso. Rented houses with the bare minimum of furniture. A barn in Tennessee with no heat, where he wrote much of Suttree. He lived for years on small grants and the kindness of friends, sometimes washing his clothes in lakes because he couldn't afford a laundromat. The poverty was a direct consequence of the choice he'd made, which was to spend his time writing instead of earning a living.
The cheapness of the rooms is the obvious thing, but the more interesting fact is how empty they were. McCarthy didn't decorate, didn't accumulate, didn't have books shelved around him in the romantic novelist's library. Richard Woodward's 1992 profile in The New York Times Magazine describes the spareness of his living arrangements with a kind of wonder. A bed, a chair, the typewriter on a card table. Nothing on the walls. Nothing on the surfaces. The room was a container for the work and almost nothing else.
I think this is the most underrated piece of his routine. An empty room is a room with nothing in it to look at when you should be writing. There are no distractions because there's nothing to be distracted by. McCarthy had stripped his physical environment down to the absolute minimum required to keep him alive and producing prose, and the prose got the benefit of every hour the empty room created. Most modern writers fight a daily battle against their own surroundings, the books they could be reading instead, the projects on the desk that aren't this one, the cluttered space that quietly drains attention before they sit down. McCarthy solved that problem by removing the surroundings.
The Discipline of Refusal
McCarthy almost never gave interviews. He turned down readings. He refused to teach. He skipped his own award ceremonies. When All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award in 1992, he didn't show up. When Oprah picked The Road for her book club in 2007, the conversation she eventually got was the first television interview he'd ever given, at the age of seventy-three. He famously said in that interview that he'd rather be talking to anyone than another writer, and that the literary social circuit struck him as a system designed to keep writers from doing any actual writing.
The refusal wasn't a personality quirk so much as a productivity strategy in the deepest sense. Every writer who's been published understands the gravitational pull of the literary apparatus, the readings and the panels and the festivals and the email correspondence with editors and agents and other writers. Each individual obligation looks small. Together they consume a working life. McCarthy understood this, and he made the simple decision to refuse all of it, from the start, with no exceptions. His friends accepted that he wouldn't come to dinner. His publishers accepted that he wouldn't tour. The space that opened up around him as a result was the space the books got written in.
His most famous statement on the matter, made in the same Oprah interview, is a kind of dare disguised as a definition: "Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." The line gets quoted as evidence of his bleakness, but I read it differently. He's saying that serious work demands serious sacrifice, and the writers who try to have a normal social life and produce major books at the same time will end up with neither. He picked the books, and to make room for them he refused everything else. The discipline wasn't in the writing. The discipline was in the saying no.
The Santa Fe Institute
The strangest detail of McCarthy's later life is where he ended up working. From the 1990s onward, he kept an office at the Santa Fe Institute, an independent research center for theoretical physics, complexity science, mathematics, and economics. He was the only novelist on the campus. He spent his days writing in a building full of physicists and information theorists, and he became close friends with several of them, including the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the computer scientist David Krakauer. He read scientific papers in his spare time and edited manuscripts for the institute's researchers, sometimes returning their drafts covered in red pen.
The arrangement looks eccentric, but it makes sense if you think about what McCarthy was trying to do as a novelist. His prose, especially in the late books, is interested in deep time, geology, biology, the physical universe as a system that doesn't care about humans. The Santa Fe Institute gave him daily access to people who thought about those things at a professional level. He could ask a mathematician a question over lunch and get an answer that would inform a paragraph in the next book. The institute also gave him an office that was protected from interruption by the conventions of an academic research center, where colleagues understand that closed doors mean closed doors.
The deeper lesson is about who you put yourself near. McCarthy ran from the literary world but ran toward a community of scientists, because he'd decided that the scientists were thinking about the things he wanted his fiction to be made of. Most novelists organize their social lives around other novelists, and the result is prose that sounds like it was written for other novelists. McCarthy went looking for a different kind of company, found it, and the late novels show what that exposure produced. If you want your work to absorb something specific, put yourself near the people who already have it.