True Stories #174 - The Typewriter

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you'reabout to hear is a true story.
Cormick McCarthy bought a typewriter. Thiswas back in nineteen sixty three. This
typewriter would go on to write astory of its own. Cormick McCarthy is

(00:27):
a known name in literary circles.He's famous in that world, but he's
also a man worth knowing far outsidethe book world. And this is the
story of one man and his belovedmachine, The Light Blue Letter of thirty
two Olivetti manual typewriter. This typewriterwas invented back in nineteen fifty. It

(00:52):
was immediately popular. In fact,the Illinois Institute of Technology would one day
call it the best product design ofthe last one hundred years. It was
lightweight, at least compared to allthe other clunky machines out there. It
was portable yet durable, and thosekeys would clank the letters of the alphabet

(01:15):
against an ink ribbon, transferring theletters and words onto paper, and that
ribbon would reverse when you got tothe end twice the amount of us.
This was revolutionary stuff. And whenyou had typed all the way to the
end of a line, there wasa bell, an actual bell that would

(01:38):
ding to inform you it was timeto hit the return key. And there
he was, thirteen years after theOlivetter was introduced to the public, Cormick
McCarthy standing in a Tennessee pawn shopwith fifty bucks in his hand. He
had written a bit in college tobecome an auto mechanic in Chicago, but

(02:02):
typing away in his free time allthe while. His first book came out
in nineteen sixty five. It wascalled The Orchard Keeper. Of course,
it had been hammered out on thatold machine. Book number two came out
in nineteen sixty eight, The OuterDark, lukewarm sales, but he continued

(02:23):
to write until finally he broke throughwith worldwide success and acclaimed. The nineteen
ninety two masterpiece All the Pretty Horseswon him the National Book Award and was
a New York Times bestseller. Andyou may have seen the two thousand seven

(02:44):
movie that was based on one ofhis later books, the Coen Brothers classic
No Country Four Old Men, andCormick McCarthy mashed that old typewriter in his
unique way with his own writing style. He wrote in simple sentences, lots

(03:05):
of capital letters and periods. Hewas not a fan of the comma,
and he hated semi colons. Hisdialogue between characters contained no quotation marks,
he said, quotation marks just blotup the pages. His novels were often
alarmingly descriptively violence, exploring the darknessof the human condition, and dystopian visions

(03:32):
of our future. And at thetime of this broadcast, he remains a
spry eighty nine year old Pulitzer Prizewinner, still typing away at his literary
legacy of an estimated five million words, but not all of them on that

(03:53):
old nineteen fifty light blue letter ofthirty two Olivetti manual type writer. Finally,
after more than half a century,that trusty old machine finally gave up
the ghost, and Cormick decided toput it up for auction at Christie's to
benefit the research work of the SantaFe Institute. And that typewriter that he

(04:18):
bought so long ago in a pawnshop for fifty bucks sold for two hundred
fifty four thousand, five hundred dollars. So what is Cormick McCarthy typing on
today? Well after he lost hisold workhorse back in two thousand and nine,

(04:42):
one of his friends went out andbought him another identical machine, another
letter of thirty two Olivetti manual,and it was a beauty. It was
purchased for eleven dollars plus shipping andthe story of Cormick McCarthy and his trusty

(05:08):
old typewriter is a true story.True Stories podcast dot com