Literary Notes for Today:

It's the birthday of novelist Cormac McCarthy, (books by this author) born Charles McCarthy Jr. in Providence, Rhode Island (1933). He spent four years in the Air Force, went to the University of Tennessee, and then dropped out after just a couple years. He spent the next few years working on what would become his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Over the next twenty-five years, McCarthy wrote four more novels. Most of them were set in rural Tennessee, and he was known for filling them with violence and bloodshed. In the late '70s, he moved to El Paso, Texas, and he set his next book, Blood Meridian, in the Texas of the 1850s. It was his most violent book yet, about a fourteen-year-old boy who roams around the West with a band of killers. The New York Times called it "the bloodiest book since the Iliad."
It wasn't until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 that McCarthy finally became widely recognized. It's about a sixteen-year-old Texas rancher who leaves his family and rides into northern Mexico looking to make his fortune. It won the National Book Award and sold almost 200,000 copies in less than six months. It's since been made into a Hollywood movie.
McCarthy doesn't do book tours or give lectures, and he's never taught or written journalism to support himself. He said, "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first men to set foot on the moon on this day in 1969. Neil Armstrong was the first to walk on the moon, because he was closest to the door.