Centre English professor leads project to catalog Cormac McCarthy's personal library
Stacey Peebles, H. W. Stodghill Jr., and Adele H. Stodghill Professor of English and Chair of the Film Studies Program, is leading an exciting project to catalog an important piece of American literary history, the personal library of celebrated author Cormac McCarthy.
Peebles is the president of the Cormac McCarthy Society and has been editor of The Cormac McCarthy Journal since 2010. In addition to her research on McCarthy, Peebles studies contemporary war stories, and has published widely in both areas, including “Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldier's Experience in Iraq,” “McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen” and the forthcoming “Cormac McCarthy's Maps and Mazes: Tracing the Critical Reception.”
McCarthy, whose novels include “All the Pretty Horses,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Blood Meridian” and “The Road,” for which he won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, left an expansive library of approximately 20,000 books when he passed away in 2023. The project offers a unique opportunity to gain insight into the interests of the notoriously private McCarthy.
“We’ve always wondered what he read,” said Peebles. “We knew that he read really widely, but other than that, we didn’t have a lot of details.”
The goal of The Cormac McCarthy Library Project, which was featured in the September/October 2025 issue of Smithsonian Magazine, is to create an open-access, searchable online database of the collection, to help researchers understand McCarthy’s reading interests and how his collection may have informed his work.
“The books have been donated to the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Texas State University, and the Santa Fe Institute, so the database will be the only place to see everything. You’ll be able to search and see, for example, whether he read Annie Dillard, how much Wittgenstein he read, whether a book was annotated, and which institution it went to,” said Peebles. “My hope is that it will give people some guidance when they go to work with the actual books and enable them to plan their research.”
The project came about in 2023, when Peebles was interviewed about McCarthy’s legacy on the YouTube program Books and Bridges. A viewer asked what would happen to McCarthy’s library.
“At the time, I told him, ‘No, I don't know anything about that, but I certainly hope that it's preserved in some form, because this is really important,’” said Peebles.
McCarthy’s brother, Dennis, saw the interview and contacted Peebles to ask if she had any ideas about what to do with the library. In March 2024, Peebles visited Santa Fe to meet with him and see the library.
“McCarthy had passed away some time before, so the house was not in the condition it was when he was living there,” said Peebles. “Everywhere you looked, there were boxes and boxes of books. Then more boxes of books downstairs, in the basement, in the garage, and then more in storage lockers in El Paso! The enormity of it was overwhelming, both intellectually and physically.”
With the family’s permission, Peebles assembled a team of fellow McCarthy scholars to catalog the collection and record any annotations they found.
“Santa Fe already looks like nowhere else. It’s at 7,000 feet elevation, so you’re in the high desert, the skies are super blue, and the architecture is predominantly adobe. But to walk into his house and see where he lived and worked, what he annotated, how he made his notes, and how he read everything was really special,” said Peebles. “And it was really fun to share that experience with others.”
The project has not been without its challenges. Peebles and her team made intermittent trips to Santa Fe around their jobs, with limited funding, and uncertainty about how long the collection would remain accessible.
“When we got started, I told my team this could all fall apart at any time,” said Peebles, “but any record we got of his reading habits would be much more than we knew before.”
The sheer scope of the collection also presented its own hurdles.
“Every visit there'd be a new surprise,” Peebles laughed. “We started finding boxes of books from dealers that hadn’t been opened yet. One dealer in particular wrapped them in tissue paper, then bubble wrap, and then brown paper, all taped up. It took us longer to open the dang books than it did to catalog them!”
Despite these challenges, Peebles found the project to be a rewarding experience, particularly the relationship she developed with McCarthy’s family.
“They have been so gracious and welcoming,” said Peebles. “I’m always cognizant of what an extreme privilege this was, that the family trusted us with this level of access.”
Also rewarding was the camaraderie Peebles enjoyed with her colleagues.
“If I'd just been doing it myself, or with people I didn't know, it could have been a real chore. But we were all working together and having a great time. We’d go back to our rental in the evening, cook dinner, and just hang out and reflect on what we’d found that day. It was so much fun.”
Some of the more unusual finds included a number of books about animal attacks, a 35-volume set on the history of Utah, a 1970s paperback about spontaneous human combustion, and a dead bat in one of boxes.
“We did not catalog the dead bat,” Peebles laughed.
For Peebles, some of the more interesting pieces were from McCarthy’s college years.
“I would open a book and think, ‘This doesn’t seem like it’s annotated in the same way, but it still seems like McCarthy,’ then I realized that these were books he read in college,” said Peebles. “I opened a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ and it just didn't seem the same as his other annotations. I realized he was making notes of what the professor had said. So, to look at a book that he read and annotated during that part of his life was pretty cool.”
Peebles also found a book about the history of the English language that may have influenced McCarthy’s unique writing style.
“He’s known for his nonstandard punctuation and some idiosyncratic elements of his own style. Was he getting some of these ideas from this book on grammar and usage that he read in class in 1958? It’s really interesting to think about.”
After more than a year spent cataloging the library, Peebles is now planning the project’s next phase.
“We have to take all of this data, which is still pretty raw, and turn it into a searchable database. I want it to be open access, so that both academic and non-academic scholars can easily access the information without a paywall,” said Peebles. “I’m also working on a monograph about the library, some of the most interesting volumes, and the story of the project itself that I’m going to publish.”
Peebles is also working with the University of South Carolina Press, which will publish the completed database online and feature a series of periodic pop-up exhibits about the library.
“When the site is finished, you’ll be able to browse the database as well as see updates about projects related to the library. For example, there’s a filmmaker named Jack Evans who is making a documentary about it, or you’ll be able to see what a particular institution is doing with its collection. We’ll also feature some of the images that we took while we were cataloging the library.”
While the project is far from complete, it is already generating interest among McCarthy enthusiasts, with Peebles receiving inquiries from people around the world.
“I was contacted by a retired high school teacher, who’d written a really obscure book about Kierkegaard and wanted to know if his book had been among the very last that I’d cataloged, which was mentioned in the Smithsonian story. I was able to tell him that it was, and I even sent him a picture of it. He was so thrilled!”
Peebles’ own passion for McCarthy’s writing began when she read All the Pretty Horses in a first-year college English class.
“I'm from Texas, and I assumed he was a Texas writer, because he got the dialogue right, he got the landscape right. It was funny, moving, and poetic. It really captivated me.”
Peebles, who will be teaching a class on McCarthy in the spring 2026 term, believes McCarthy’s enduring appeal can be attributed to his authenticity.
“McCarthy was not a perfect person, by any means, but he was unstinting and unapologetic in his dedication to his art,” said Peebles. “For three decades of his writing life, he made no money, but he kept writing. And when fame came, he continued to write about the things he wanted to, in the way that he wanted to.”
“He was always after the big questions – life, death, morality. Big stuff that’s not easy, and he never made it easy. He really never wrote a bad book, and there are very few authors you could say that about.”
