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King, Daniel Robert (2013) "Your side of the street": Cormac McCarthy's collaborative authorship. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.

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Abstract

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between contemporary author Cormac McCarthy and his editors: Albert Erskine at Random House and Gary Fisketjon and Dan Frank at Alfred A Knopf. In investigating these relationships I attempt to give insight into the working practices of McCarthy, and by doing so examine the changing world of publishing at Random House. I also explore the implications for established critical understandings of McCarthy's work of the significant changes which were made during the re-writing and editing of McCarthy's novels. In mapping relationships between author, editor and agent I conduct a study of the changing modes and models of author-editor and author-editor-agent relationships within Random House and its subsidiary Alfred A Knopf. Taking each of McCarthy's novels in turn as a case study I construct an examination of the relationships between this tightly knit core group and the various specialist collaborators who appear at scattered but significant moments during McCarthy's literary career. It is in this web of collaboration and interdependence in concert with established understandings of the author-role and author-function that this thesis builds its understanding of McCarthy's authorship practices.

In this thesis I draw intensively upon archival material held at both the University of Texas at San Marcos, where McCarthy's own papers are held following their sale to the Witliff South Western Writers Collection, and the papers of Albert Erskine, currently held at the University of Virginia as part of their Small Special Collections Archive. Between the two archives, this body of material contains personal and professional correspondence between McCarthy and his various collaborators, as well as McCarthy's handwritten notebooks in which he made copious notes from his various source books and, most significantly, the various typewritten drafts and redrafts of all of McCarthy's novels. These drafts include handwritten notes from both McCarthy himself as he altered the typescripts during the redrafting process and those of his editors, who annotated the various drafts McCarthy sent them in order to suggest changes or ask questions about various aspects of the drafts. Through an engagement with these valuable sources of unpublished primary material I attempt in this thesis to resituate the input of McCarthy's editor and other collaborators into an understanding of McCarthy's work.

Item Type:	Thesis (University of Nottingham only) (PhD)
Supervisors:	Newman, J.A. Thompson, G.W.
Keywords:	Cormac McCarthy, relationships with editors, Random House
Subjects:	P Language and literature > PS American literature
Faculties/Schools:	UK Campuses > Faculty of Arts > School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies
Item ID:	14309
Depositing User:	EP, Services
Date Deposited:	13 Jun 2014 09:33
Last Modified:	15 Dec 2017 22:11
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/14309

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