It is a common misconception among writers and artists in general, especially those who really seek to create something great, that one’s creation must be entirely original and new. Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist of The Road, would ridicule this idea. In a 1992 interview with the New York Times, he said simply that “the ugly fact is books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” This assertion prompted Dr. Michael Crews, the chair of Regent’s English Department, to determine the extent to which McCarthy actually held to this philosophy in his novels. By reading through hundreds of McCarthy’s notebooks and papers, Crews sought to ascertain both the method McCarthy used when drawing from other authors and the full extent of the literary influences he drew from. Before coming to Regent, a young Michael Crews discarded over a hundred pages of his PhD dissertation and committed himself to an additional year at Baylor University to write a new thesis centered around archival research on McCarthy. In this dissertation, which he developed into a manuscript during his time at Regent, Dr. Crews sought to connect McCarthy’s published works to pages upon pages of almost unreadable scrawlings and unhewn ideas in McCarthy’s archival papers.

Crews published this manuscript as Books Are Made Out of Books, which was well received by many experts on McCarthy. When Texas State University purchased a new collection of McCarthy’s papers in 2024, Crews decided to continue his archival research in the fall of 2025. On April 9, Regent’s Sigma Tau Delta chapter invited Dr. Michael Crews to present this recent archival research to students. In this presentation, Crews explained that a technique he often encountered was “phraseological appropriation.” In a literary context, this can be defined as the repurposed integration of another author’s specific phrasing into one’s own work. For example, Crews discovered in his research that a specific turn of phrase from Melville’s Moby Dick also appears in McCarthy’s 1985 novel, Blood Meridian. While scanning through pages of McCarthy’s notes that had been written for a different novel, Suttree, Crews found a single typewritten quotation that stood apart from the conglomeration of entries on the page. It read: “‘federated along one keel’ Melville.” Oddly, however, a search for the phrase in Suttree yielded no results. Crews almost intended to disregard the quotation as something that never reached the final draft, but felt the phrase was naggingly familiar.

A subsequent search in Blood Meridian confirmed this suspicion. McCarthy’s reinterpretation of the Melville quotation describes the collective mind of a group of men: they “were federated with invisible wires of vigilance.” In both works, the phrase describes the connection between members of a motley crew. Consequently, Melville’s crew can be used to better understand McCarthy’s intended presentation of his own characters. This one example is representative of a host of others in which McCarthy repurposes phrases he is inspired by, utilizing them to create something uniquely his in the process. Following the presentation, Dr. Crews was asked what first drew him to McCarthy’s work. He explained that McCarthy’s 1992 All the Pretty Horses was the novel that first captivated him, citing three aspects of the work that struck him as unique. First, he admired the language itself, attributing a good part of McCarthy’s talent to the lyricism woven throughout his prose. Second, Crews said the novel simply felt like a classic. It told a story that people had always liked to read, recognizing the attributes of a good story and implementing them.

Finally, Crews appreciated that the novel unapologetically established itself as a western. Rather than trying to shirk the potential confines of the genre by an ambitious lunging toward raw originality, McCarthy simply endeavors to tell a good story. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes that “no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” This was the philosophy that McCarthy both held to and substantiated by the testament of his own literary success. While originality and newness are certainly good things, a disordered pursuit of these goals can distract from the first realistic step toward truly creating something new. The pursuit of truth should precede the pursuit of originality. So take a phrase out of McCarthy’s book: use your imagebearing, creative soul to make something truly original by seeking to tell the truth through the repurposing of the preexisting.