McCarthy is one of the few writers who gave a lifetime word count, and he gave it almost by accident, in a letter certifying that a battered portable typewriter was really his. The number is large. What's interesting is how small a share of it ever reached a reader.
Five Million Typed, Roughly a Million Published
McCarthy's estimate was deliberately broad. He counted every book including three that were never published, plus drafts and letters, across half a century. That's the total that went through the machine, and the machine is the reason he could count it at all: one typewriter, bought secondhand in the 1960s, used for everything until 2009. The story of that object is on what typewriter Cormac McCarthy used.
Now put the published work beside it. Twelve novels, from The Orchard Keeper in 1965 to The Passenger and Stella Maris in 2022. At a generous average of ninety thousand words apiece, that's a little over a million words of published fiction. Even allowing for the screenplays and the two plays, something like four fifths of what he typed never became a book anyone could buy.
That ratio is the most useful thing on this page. A working novelist with a reputation for saying nothing and publishing rarely still put four words through the platen for every one that survived. Drafting is not the same activity as publishing, and the gap between them is where most of the labour lives.
The other way to read five million is as an annual rate. Spread across fifty years it comes to roughly 100,000 words a year, which is one decent-sized novel's worth of typing every twelve months, sustained for half a century. That's a modest daily figure and a formidable career figure, and the discrepancy between those two impressions is exactly what makes long careers hard to imitate.
Twelve Novels in Fifty-Seven Years
The publication record runs 1965, 1968, 1973, 1979, 1985, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2005, 2006, and then a sixteen-year silence broken by two books in the same season in 2022. That averages out near one novel every five years, with long droughts and sudden clusters.
The individual timelines vary enormously. Blood Meridian occupied him from roughly 1975 to 1984, with a documented six-month stall in 1979, on top of years of research that included moving to El Paso, learning Spanish, and retracing the Glanton gang's route through the Southwest. The Road, by his own account to Oprah Winfrey in 2007, took about six weeks. Same writer, same typewriter, and a difference of nearly a decade between the two.
McCarthy never gave a daily target, and no source records him naming one. His only description of the working day, given to The Wall Street Journal in 2009, is about coffee, reading a little, typing a few words, and looking out of the window. Anyone quoting a McCarthy word quota has invented it.
How Long the Novels Are
The Road is the short one, counted at around 58,700 words across 241 pages, which is close to novella territory and part of why it reads at the pace it does. Suttree is the long one, running 471 pages in the Random House paperback. Blood Meridian sits somewhere in the middle at 337 pages in the Modern Library edition, with word-count estimates that disagree by thirty percent depending on which aggregator you consult.
Treat all of those word figures as approximations. None of them come from publishers, and McCarthy's page counts are misleading anyway, since a page of his prose carries fewer words than most novelists' and more weight. The absent quotation marks and the stripped punctuation leave a lot of white space. His writing on that choice is covered in Cormac McCarthy on punctuation.
Reading how Cormac McCarthy worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.
Get the Book on Amazon →365 mornings, in paperback and Kindle.
What You Can Steal
- Expect to write several times what you publish. McCarthy's own estimate implies roughly four unpublished words for every published one.
- Books take wildly different amounts of time. Nine years for Blood Meridian, six weeks for The Road. Neither pace was wrong.
- A silence is not a stop. Sixteen years passed between The Road and The Passenger, and he was working the whole time.
- Keep the tool boring. One cheap manual typewriter for fifty years removed an entire category of distraction from his working life.