Cormac McCarthy’s ‘secret muse’ first had sex with him when she was 17, she says
American author Cormac McCarthy was 42 when he met 16-year-old Augusta Britt, who she says inspired characters in some of his famous novels
The great American novelist Cormac McCarthy was defensively private and did not share much about the inspiration behind his books – or about himself.
However, the author, who died in 2023, apparently spent much of the late 1970s with a teenager named Augusta Britt, who reportedly inspired characters in some of his most famous books.
She was 16 when she met the then 42-year-old writer in 1976.
Britt, now 64, guarded her identity and her story for nearly five decades, publicly revealing herself as the author’s “single secret muse” in a Vanity Fair profile published this week.
Vincenzo Barney, who wrote the profile, argues that many of the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s leading men were inspired by Britt, a “five-foot-four bad**s Finnish-American cowgirl … whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had ‘trouble coming to grips with.’”
