Wittliff Collections doubles its Cormac McCarthy Archive

Cormac McCarthy's high school senior portrait (1951).

The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University has acquired an extraordinary new Cormac McCarthy collection that more than doubles the size of its archive on the famed author.

McCarthy, considered one of the world’s greatest writers, died at age 89 in 2023. He won America’s top literary honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Road and the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses. Several of his works were adapted into films, including No Country for Old Men, which won an Academy Award for best picture.

This revelatory new addition consists of 36 banker’s boxes and contains deeply personal material that McCarthy held back during his lifetime. Included are his private journals and early writings, rare photographs and family memorabilia, and correspondence with close friends who inspired elements of his work. The files also hold manuscripts for unpublished novels and trace the decades of effort that went into his final two books, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which he published in 2022 at age 88.

The Wittliff’s original collection of McCarthy papers, acquired in 2007, have drawn more than 800 researchers from 25 countries across six continents. McCarthy’s brother Dennis, who serves as McCarthy’s literary executor and worked to facilitate the new acquisition, observed, “The Wittliff Collections have been a treasure trove for McCarthy scholars. With these new materials, you will have an amazingly richer picture for understanding Cormac and his work.”

A collection of McCathy's unpublished writings and miscellaneous notes.

Wittliff Collections Director David Coleman hailed the McCarthy addition as TXST pursues R1 status as a leading research university and said that the new materials will completely reinvent McCarthy scholarship. 

“We are excited about this important new acquisition that further elevates The Wittliff’s standing while advancing significant humanities scholarship at Texas State,” Coleman said. “McCarthy was a famously reticent public figure and very few people realized that he had preserved such extensive records of his own life. This new material will sustain researchers for generations to come.”

Katie Salzmann, lead archivist for The Wittliff, will preserve and catalog this addition to McCarthy's papers. She said she is looking forward to welcoming new researchers as well as returning scholars to The Wittliff’s reading room. 

“I am particularly excited for what this means for Texas State students and faculty who will have access to this rich archive right here on campus — something that others will travel across the world to view.” Salzmann said she expects the new McCarthy materials to be available for research in late 2025.

The Wittliff Collections has been steadily increasing in size and stature since its founding in 1986 by screenwriter and photographer Bill Wittliff and his wife, Sally. A research archive and museum gallery with literary, photography and music exhibitions, The Wittliff has more than 500 collections representing a wide range of creative voices that reflect the American Southwest’s “Spirit of Place.” 

For more information about The Wittliff: Collections, visit www.thewittliffcollections.txst.edu.