Cormac McCarthy's First Writing Job Was Deleting Swift's Commas

By Grace Kim

In 1959, Wes Morgan counted the damage: the anthology version of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" carried 21 percent fewer punctuation marks than Swift's original 1729 pamphlet. The man who streamlined Swift was a University of Tennessee student named Cormac McCarthy, and his professor approved. "This is very good. This is just what is needed," Robert Woodham Daniel said.

That anecdote anchors an excerpt from Tracy Daugherty's forthcoming biography Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited (St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2026), which traces the novelist's return to Knoxville and his decision, at roughly 25, to commit to writing.

How did McCarthy land the punctuation job?

After his air force discharge, McCarthy re-enrolled at the University of Tennessee in fall 1957, supported by the GI Bill. "[I] wandered from one department to the next taking what courses I thought would please me, like a drunk in a supermarket," he recalled. Among them: Daniel's Expository Writing and Writing of Fiction courses.

Daniel was editing a textbook, The Written Word: Forms of Writing, published in 1960, and he hired McCarthy to re-punctuate 18th-century English essays. McCarthy found the writers punctuated "so poorly" — semicolons every few lines, "just terrible." He stripped out most of the commas from an essay he remembered as "[Jonathan] Swift or someone," and Daniel praised the result.

McCarthy's position was blunt: "there's no reason to…blot the page with weird little marks….I mean if you write properly you shouldn't have to punctuate."

What ideas moved through those classrooms?

McCarthy had little patience for literary theory, but Daugherty argues the Southern Agrarians seeped in anyway. The Agrarians — Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, largely based at Vanderbilt — had declared in their 1930 manifesto I'll Take My Stand that literature's purpose was to answer "Whom and what shall our souls believe?" Their program ran on family farming, self-sacrifice and community, and it conspicuously omitted slavery and rebellion from its mythic South.

By McCarthy's return, that aesthetic had hardened into New Criticism (the doctrine that a text's value lies solely in its language, with theory and biography treated as contaminants). In the 1970s, McCarthy told a student of psychiatrist Robert Coles: "An intellectual is a person who feels that his learning—and it may be pitifully little—entitles him to status. People who really do know are inevitably returned to the common ground of man." Daugherty reads that line as Agrarian thinking absorbed whole.

Professor Daniel also covered the debates around "Southern gothic," a term novelist Ellen Glasgow coined in her 1935 essay "Heroes and Monsters" in The Saturday Review of Literature. Glasgow praised but warned against Faulkner's "fantastic nightmares": "the literature that crawls too long in the mire will lose at last the power of standing erect."

Where do the Beats come in?

In April 1958, McCarthy published a letter in The Reporter responding to political scientist Eugene Burdick's article "The Innocent Nihilists Adrift in Squaresville." Burdick described the real hipster as "committed, gone, burning" — and Daugherty notes McCarthy recognized himself as poised between Squaresville (Knoxville, the university) and the urge to burn. The debt surfaces decades later in Suttree, which echoes Ginsberg's Howl and gives a hitchhiker a ride in "an old Hudson," a car that figures prominently in Kerouac's On the Road.

The summer of 1959 took McCarthy hitchhiking to California — his first immersive look at the West after Alaska. In San Francisco he missed the Beats but met John Sheddan, "Long John," a hulking on-and-off Tennessee student. Dennis Francis, who knew both men, remembered the scene outside City Lights Bookstore, a wrecked Cadillac convertible and a skipping record player: "Cormac was probably looking for a way to try to save a quarter or something. He was such a cheap son of a bitch!"

What does this change for McCarthy's readers?

It locates the origin of his stripped-down style in a paid chore, not a theory. McCarthy himself framed the turn simply: he wanted to write about matters "troubling to the human soul," not "what Bob said to Alice in the drawing room." His worry, he said, quoting Melville, was "O time, patience, cash! Mainly the cash." The full biography publishes in 2026.