Lee Holleman’s initial glimpse of the campus left her unsettled, almost gaunt in its shape and design. It struck her as underfed somehow, a perception of architectural leaness. “The University of Tennessee was crowded with students from Hoboken…[and] New Jersey,” she recalled. “They adapted with remarkable speed while I found myself struggling.” She had come from Wynne, Arkansas, aiming to study the liberal arts. “I couldn’t believe it when I first arrived [in Knoxville] to discover…a place that resembled Arkansas more than Arkansas had changed; this city stubbornly refused to bend, either mentally or emotionally.”
Meanwhile, the man she would soon meet and wed was also navigating a difficult homecoming to Knoxville. On October 2, 1957, The Knoxville News-Sentinel carried the terse line, “C. J. McCarthy Jr. accidentally shot.” The details varied widely between accounts, one claiming a leg surgery and another asserting a self-inflicted wound from a .22 rifle during target practice, the injury described as minor: the bullet resting just beneath the skin. His mother insisted he wasn’t even carrying a rifle at the moment. She offered another version—“returning [a] pistol to its holster and the trigger accidentally caught on the holster causing the weapon to discharge,” Gladys said—displaying a tone that sounded almost official. Whether alcohol played any part in the incident was never openly discussed.
The answer lay not in modern industrialism, they said, but in Southern agrarian traditions, family farming, which imparted the wisdom of self-sacrifice, a spiritual focus, and a commitment to community.
After leaving the air force, Cormac McCarthy had spent several months hitchhiking across the country. By fall of 1957 he had returned to Tennessee. He re-enrolled at the university because the GI Bill offered support and he preferred not to work. “[I] wandered from one department to the next taking what courses I thought would please me, like a drunk in a supermarket,” he recalled. He enrolled in physics and engineering, yet he also took Expository Writing: Modern Essays and Composition and Writing of Fiction, taught by an instructor named Robert Woodham Daniel. Daniel also served on the advisory board of the campus literary publication, the Phoenix.
McCarthy harbored little appetite for literary theory (though in later years he would become intrigued by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigations into language and its relationship to the unconscious). Rather than theory, he sought practical elements of writing, yet academic environments inevitably soaked up some of his views. In the 1970s, he would tell a student of psychiatrist Robert Coles, “An intellectual is a person who feels that his learning—and it may be pitifully little—entitles him to status. People who really do know are inevitably returned to the common ground of man.” His insistence that understanding knowledge meant returning to the “common ground of man” reveals how deeply the Southern Agrarians’ thinking influenced him during this brief academic return.
The Agrarians were a circle of prose writers, poets, and critics—such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren (whom McCarthy would come to know)—closely tied to Vanderbilt University. They argued that literature’s foremost aim was to address the question, “Whom and what shall our souls believe?” Their answer pointed away from modern industrial life, toward Southern agrarian traditions, family farming, and the virtues of self-sacrifice, spiritual purpose, and communal responsibility.
The group initially called itself the Fugitives in the 1920s, later adopting the label Agrarians. In their imagined revival of a mythic past, the Agrarians’ polemics often ignored the South’s histories of slavery and rebellion. They articulated a stark vision in the 1930 manifesto I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. They argued for a “violent” break from the modern present: “[A]n agrarian society…[values] a form of labor pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model [for other pursuits]…[T]he culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations.”
McCarthy believed “there’s no reason to…blot the page with weird little marks… I mean if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”
The Agrarians’ influence remained strong in the academy, particularly in the South, as McCarthy re-enrolled at the University of Tennessee, yet they had evolved toward what would become the New Criticism. New Critics argued that a text’s value derived solely from its language. Literature, they claimed, was organic, akin to soil: adding theory, history, or biographical information could corrupt it. Only its formal properties mattered, though it was taught as a branch of history, Tate lamented. Students were learning dates and terms rather than poetry.
What drew McCarthy more directly were debates about the aims of his favorite Southern writers—Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. Among literary critics, “Southern gothic” had become a common, if somewhat derisive, label used to explain the ubiquity of bleak settings and deformed characters in Southern fiction. In the nineteenth century, many Romantic novels—including Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein—as well as Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, dwelled on grotesque or fantastical elements to expose the rot beneath the outward grandeur of estates and well-ordered towns. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, some Southern writers emphasized eccentric behavior to subvert the aristocratic gloss of gentility and custom.
Novelist Ellen Glasgow coined “Southern gothic” in her 1935 essay “Heroes and Monsters” for The Saturday Review of Literature. She both praised and gently reproved Faulkner’s “fantastic nightmares,” arguing that his portrayal captured the South’s ongoing social upheaval. Yet she warned that prose mired in decay would eventually lose the ability to stand upright, and she urged writers to face life’s living tissues rather than merely dwelling on decay: “our age” has many more hues than “the colors of putrescence.”
In his classes, Professor Daniel taught the Agrarians and the merits and drawbacks of the gothic, yet his real passion lay in structure and the craft of writing. His interests resonated with McCarthy, who in turn helped Daniel. Daniel eventually commissioned him to contribute to a textbook he was preparing, The Written Word: Forms of Writing (published in 1960). “Part of the textbook included English essays from the 18th century. And [Daniel] handed me a bunch of these. He said, ‘re-punctuate these things.’ And I was getting paid to do this… So I took them home, and it was just, you know, [the writers] wrote so well and they punctuated so poorly. And every few lines… it would be a semicolon and it was just terrible.”
McCarthy insisted that “there’s no reason to…blot the page with weird little marks… I mean if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”
He recalled that one of the essays was by or about “[Jonathan] Swift or someone.” He removed most of the commas, took the piece to Daniel, and the professor affirmed, “This is very good. This is just what is needed.”
Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” appeared in The Written Word. Wes Morgan later noted that the published version trimmed about 21 percent of the “weird little marks” from Swift’s original 1729 pamphlet. McCarthy had streamlined Swift for the modern era.
He kept up the intensive reading habit he had begun in Alaska. He started thinking seriously that perhaps he could write novels as well—and perhaps do it better… [I]f someone possesses a talent and sits down to discover it, there’s a sense of power and a sense of mystery about it. There’s a feeling that you’re on the verge of creating something that carries significance.”
He began to entertain the notion of becoming a writer—“I don’t know why… [P]eople [just] like to do things they’re good at,” he said.
Overall, he carried with him a perception of the world that left him “very exercised”: it supplied him with material. He knew he wanted to grapple with issues that touched the human soul, not “what Bob said to Alice in the drawing room one evening. I mean, I [didn’t] understand Proust or Henry James or any of those people who don’t write about life and death. To me, that isn’t literature.”
“I didn’t have too many doubts about my abilities,” he added. He’d known since he was eight that he could write. “The only thing that worried me was—what is it Melville says? ‘O time, patience, cash!’ Mainly the cash. You’ve got to figure out how to eat while you’re doing this.”
McCarthy’s fresh devotion to reading and writing was like a cypress stump in the middle of a stream, impeding the easy flow of his social life.
During semester breaks or the summers, Knoxville’s confines often felt claustrophobic. He found the family atmosphere stifling. The town’s overt racism sharpened his discomfort. One day, walking downtown, a Black man passed him singing The Clovers’ “One Mint Julep.” In that moment, he felt the world shifting. “It clicked in me,” he said. “These old, long-demonized cultures possessed such magic in their music that it transcended everything.” Politics or social movements aside, the energy and vitality could not be contained.
On another break from school, he escaped Knoxville by hitchhiking to Georgia. He even took a ferry to hunt on a nearby island. On the voyage, he asked the ferryman whether mosquitoes caused trouble there. “Oh yeah. Big problem,” the ferryman replied.
“How big?”
“Mister, the mosquitoes get so big here, they can stand flat-footed and fuck a moose.” Dennis remembered his brother adding this line to a story he later discarded.
At home, McCarthy kept his old circle of friends close. He remained loyal to them all. He would go to the bars with J-Bone and Junior, Conrad Payne, and the Clancy brothers. Even without the risk of an altercation with Tarzan Gwinn, a late-night misadventure could turn serious, and sometimes it did become dangerous. “Junior had the worst temper of all of them,” Walt Clancy recalled. “Right after high school, he joined the Marines, and when he got out, he started drinking too much and fell in with bad company.”
McCarthy’s newfound concentration on reading and writing created a rut in his social life, like a stubborn cypress stump blocking a stream. “The fact of being a writer or aspiring to be one placed him in a solitary world,” said Richard Marius. His family and Knoxville’s middle-class residents had “nothing to offer” his sensibilities, so he resolved to turn his attention to the city’s vast underclass—the outcasts of society—yet even there, as an educated person among the uneducated, he still did not quite belong.
Thus he would leave town and return only when a new term began. In the gaps between terms, the shifts in the city or among his friends left him more unsettled than before. The sense that the past was collapsing, which he had felt during basic training, seemed to accelerate.
During the summer of 1959 he hitchhiked to California, marking his first immersive exposure to the West beyond the time he spent in Seattle waiting to be discharged. The memory of the Alaskan tundra, damp with snow, remained vivid as he traversed the Southwestern deserts. His mind layered these landscapes like palimpsests, one over the other.
He traveled to San Francisco specifically to explore the haunts of the Beat scene. Beat writing—its brisk, jazz-like rhythms that were light and alliterative, a far cry from Faulkner’s sonorous cadences—didn’t align with McCarthy’s broader tastes, but he took the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the Beat precursor Henry Miller with seriousness. It wasn’t necessarily their styles that impressed him most, but their audacity—akin to Frank Lloyd Wright’s verve—their attitudes and worldviews, especially the nihilistic threads in some of their works. To a fellow Southern novelist, John Fergus Ryan, he’d say of Henry Miller, “I love that old man, he’s largely responsible for me becoming a writer,” meaning Miller’s defiant confidence convinced him that literature could be produced by someone like him too.
In San Francisco, McCarthy didn’t encounter any of the Beats, but he did meet a strange figure who’d prove to be a lifelong friend, an unforgettable companion, and a sometimes scary pain in the ass.
John Sheddan—“Long John”—stood as a large, formidable man with feet the size of snowshoes. An intermittent student at the University of Tennessee, he lived with his mother in a Knoxville home. Like McCarthy, during the summer of 1959 he journeyed to San Francisco to meet the “beatnik heavies.” He took pride in the fact that both he and Kerouac had shared a roof with their mothers.
In a 1996 email to McCarthy scholar Marty Priola, Sheddan described his introduction to McCarthy: “I had been roaming the streets of North Beach and haunting the coffee houses, especially the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. I didn’t meet any of the … heavies, but I saw a skinny pale-faced chap in an old fatigue jacket wandering about the streets.”
Dennis Francis, who knew both men, recalled, “Sheddan hustled two gay guys who drove a Cadillac convertible that stretched for eight blocks. They’d wrecked the convertible in front of City Lights Bookstore. There was a portable record player in the back—this was before tape decks—and the needle was skipping… Sheddan looks up and Cormac walks by, wearing a navy pea coat. Cormac was probably trying to scrounge a quarter or something. He was that tight with money!”
Sheddan added, “A few weeks later, when I [returned to Knoxville and] walked into the student center at UT, I saw [this chap] again.”
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From Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited by Tracy Daugherty. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
