A strange and telling bit of literary trivia is that two of the greatest English-language novelists of the last half-century — Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo — were not big readers when they were boys. Both took up reading as young men, and, indeed, much of their ardour as readers was sparked by the same author, William Faulkner. This is also telling, I think. From these couple of details a picture of incipient literary ambition comes plausibly clear. As young men with some thrilling but unformed sense of the talent they carried, McCarthy and Delillo read the famous prose of William Faulkner — earthy and recondite, vernacular in its music and grand in its thematic reach — and had two thoughts or intuitions, more or less at the same time. The first was: This stuff is amazing, like the greatest thing for a person to attempt and achieve. The second was: I can do that.
Read Full Article »
