Cormac McCarthy is one of the great American novelists. He was influenced by Hemingway and Faulkner, has been compared with Melville, and won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses are his masterpieces, the second forming part of the stunning Border Trilogy, which also includes The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. Later novels include No Country for Old Men and The Road, both made into acclaimed films. McCarthy’s style is sparse and idiosyncratic, with little punctuation, no quotation marks and often no attribution of dialogue. Imagine my surprise when a friend sent me an article from Nature setting out McCarthy’s tips on ‘how to write a great science paper’.1
It turns out that McCarthy has been a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, where he has helped …