Cormac McCarthy had relationship with 16-year-old ‘muse’ when he was in his 40s

Augusta Britt says affair with then-married author, who died in 2023, began after they met at an Arizona motel pool

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Cormac McCarthy reportedly had a 16-year-old muse who inspired several of his novels.
The late author, regarded as one of the greatest American novelists, began a relationship with the teenager in the 1970s when he was 42, Vanity Fair reported.
Augusta Britt told the magazine that she approached McCarthy at a motel in Arizona after recognising him as the author of a book she was reading.
“He was so shocked. He said he was surprised that anyone had read that book, let alone a 16-year-old girl,” she said. “But he said he would be delighted to sign it.”
McCarthy, the author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, first had sex with her when she was 17 and he was 43.
At the time, he was married to the singer Annie DeLisle.
The pair fled to Mexico after McCarthy altered her birth certificate on a typewriter – later inspiring 1985 novel Blood Meridian, in which a teenager flees from her home across the US border.
McCarthy reportedly feared he would be charged with statutory rape for taking a teenager across state lines.
Ms Britt owned a toy kitten named John Grady Cole, a name McCarthy would go on to use for his protagonist in All the Pretty Horses, published in 1992. The title of the novel is said to have come from a lullaby that the teenager would sing to the stuffed creature before bed.
Vanity Fair reported that she is represented in 10 of McCarthy’s books, sometimes in the form of several characters at once, as well as on the covers of The Passenger and Stella Maris.
Ms Britt said McCarthy proposed to her twice, but they never got engaged and split in 1981. The pair, however, kept in contact, and he is said to have come back to visit her every few months for the rest of his life. He died in 2023.
“It feels like I’m being disloyal to Cormac,” Ms Britt said. “But he would always warn me that at some point his archives would open up and people would find out about me.”
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