Great American novelist Cormac McCarthy was defensively private and didn’t share much about the inspiration behind his books — or about himself. However, the author, who died in 2023 , apparently lived out much of his bestseller “All the Pretty Horses” with a woman named Augusta Britt. 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. Writer Vincenzo Barney argues that many of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s leading men were inspired by Britt, a “five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl ..
. whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had ‘trouble coming to grips with.’” Britt’s story has “always been there, below the surface, between the lines in the novels’ coy subconscious,” Barney writes.
She had a strong presence throughout “The Road” author’s acclaimed “Border Trilogy,” inspired Carla Jean in “No Country for Old Men,” was Alicia in “The Passenger” and a nurse named Wanda in “Suttree.” Horses identical to her breeds appeared in the 2013 film “The Counselor,” in which Penélope Cruz plays a character based on her. “Cormac always wanted me to tell my story,” Britt said.
“He always encouraged me to write a book. He’d say, ‘Someone will do it eventually, and it might as well be you.’ B.