Following the retirement of Mr. Erskine, his longtime editor, Mr. McCarthy joined Alfred A. Knopf from Random House and hired a new editor, Gary Fisketjon, who also worked with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff, among others. Prior to the release of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, Mr. McCarthy agreed to speak to Times Magazine for his first major interview.
The article’s author, Richard B. Woodward, noted at the time that Mr. McCarthy “cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias, and does his laundry at the laundromat.”
In that interview, McCarthy named the “good writers” Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner, a list from which he omitted writers who, as he put it, “don’t deal with questions of life and death.” Of Proust and Henry James he said: “I don’t understand them. For me this is not literature. I find many authors who are considered good strange.”
All the Pretty Horses is a dark but often romantic tale about a young man named John Grady Cole, who is evicted from the Texas ranch where he grew up in 1950 and sets out for Mexico on horseback with his best friend. The book sold nearly 200,000 copies in six months.
The next two books in the Border trilogy also sold well, although some critics weren’t as enthusiastic. “In publishing, it’s a given,” Mr. Fisketjon said in a 1995 interview, “that the thrill of discovery is followed by a backlash.”
For many years, Mr. McCarthy maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a not-for-profit scientific research center founded in 1984 by particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved nearby from El Paso. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help edit scientific books, stripping them of things like exclamation marks and semicolons that he felt were superfluous.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?'” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why shouldn’t you be? To me, curiosity is the strangest thing of all.” He would drive to the institute after dropping off John, his young son, at school.