The late author, Cormac McCarthy, died in 2023 at age 89. He is famous for novels like “The Road” and “Blood Meridian.”. But new revelations have cast a different light on the hitherto lesser-known private life: his relationship with Augusta Britt, which started when she was 16 years old and he was 42. Vanity Fair recently discovered more about this relationship, including how Britt served to inspire certain elements in McCarthy’s literary work.
A Chance Meeting at a Motel Pool
When Augusta Britt met McCarthy, she was an unhappy and peripatetic teenager, in and out of foster homes, in Tucson, Arizona. She ran into him one day at the motel pool where she liked to hang out. She knew who it was – she was reading “The Orchard Keeper”, which carried an author photo on the back – and brought her book, and a purloined Colt revolver, back with her the following day.
Britt relates that he playfully asked her if she intended to shoot him, and instead, she asked for his autograph spark that would ignite a complicated and contentious relationship.
A Career Influenced by Blood Meridian
As their romance took its course, McCarthy invited Britt in 1977 to join him in Mexico after she had survived a violent incident that sent her to the hospital. Britt agreed, and the two toured the routes that gave way to “Blood Meridian”-McCarthy’s 1985 novel about a teenage runaway crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Britt was aware, however, that the highway traveled was not without its dangers as McCarthy was concerned about possible legal consequences for claims that included Mann Act violations – the transport of minors across state lines for illegal purposes. Regardless of such dangers, the two stayed together for many years. Eventually, Britt began to live with McCarthy in his El Paso, Texas home.
Love That Lasted
Although the romance finally broke up in the early 1980s, Britt and McCarthy were said to have remained in close contact for decades after. Indeed, McCarthy’s success, buoyed by grants including a MacArthur Fellowship, even enabled Britt to reconnect with her long-separated family. She declined to go back to El Paso, but McCarthy continued to visit her from time to time in Tucson.
Britt now looks back and says she inspired the seed of some elements of McCarthy’s novels, including “No Country for Old Men”. Here, for comparison, Britt’s story parallels that of the character whose wife is young and separated from him.
Britt is publishing her story of the affair with McCarthy nearly five decades after his death because McCarthy’s archives are soon to be available at Texas State University; the archives are said to include correspondence that would further illuminate their relationship.
