SOURCE: "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," in The New York Times Magazine, Vol. CXLI, No. 48,941, April 19, 1992, pp. 28-31, 36, 40.

In the following article, Woodward conducts an interview with the elusive McCarthy, and gains many insights into the author's writing habits, his personal life, and his thoughts on his own fiction.

"You know about Mojave rattlesnakes?" Cormac McCarthy asks. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, McCarthy would much rather orate than confide. And he is the sort of silver-tongued raconteur who relishes peculiar sidetracks, he leans...