Friday, January 30, 2009
By the Way Cormac McCarthy's Knox County Boyhood Home Consumed By Fire
Posted by Brantley Hargrove on Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 12:49 PM
click to enlarge
The shambling two-story house that sheltered one of our greatest living writers in his boyhood was fully engulfed in flames Tuesday night. Flames that, he might say, "sawed in the wind" while "the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them..." Sorry couldn't resist a little of "the Evening Redness in the West." 
The cause hasn't been determined just yet, but the house wasn't connected to any power, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel, nor were there any real tenants other than a few squatters (somebody pass out drunk with a cigarette, mayhaps?)
Anyway, this would be the second great writer's home in Knoxville that has been neglected and left to ruin, the first being James Agee, the less-than-prolific-but-enviable author of "A Death in the Family" and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," two works that show such love for their subjects--a bereaved family and the downtrodden sharecroppers of Alabama, rendered in such painful detail as to be more ethnography than nonfiction novel. His house, on the other hand, was torn down. It truly is a shame--the very real literary legacy of Knox County is treated as nothing of the sort.
Some of McCarthy's earliest work centered around Tennessee and its hills and rivers ("Child of God," "Outer Dark,"The Orchard Keeper," and the book that took years to finish, "Suttree."
like
dislike
