It felt as though he and McCarthy had seen the same landscapes, the same people. He recognized the book like a photograph. “He’s a writer-he’s awfully good.” Morgan begged off, but a year later came across a review in the Knoxville News Sentinel and felt a twinge of recognition at the name “Cormac McCarthy.” He bought the novel as a present for his mother but read it straight through before wrapping it. “I’ve got this friend up there living in a cabin,” the guy told him. One night in the early sixties, his roommate, an ex-military corpsman and blood technician at the local hospital, asked for a ride out to a party in the mountains. After earning degrees in physics and psychology at Georgia Tech, he went north to Knoxville to further his studies at the University of Tennessee, where he designed experiments on the ways one’s interpretations of narratives mirror back snapshots of the psyche, research that equipped him to understand how his favorite novels captured his mind. Morgan is someone who follows his passions and the motives behind them with equal fervor, like a good student of Jung. Now all Morgan could do was sit back from the fire trucks and document the tragedy with his cell phone camera. The house changed hands several times, fell into ruin, and became a hangout for vagrants. For years he’d been lobbying the city government to protect the writer’s childhood home, a large white gable, but despite the support of preservation organization Knox Heritage, which labeled the house among its “Fragile Fifteen,” nothing ever came of it. The image looked to Morgan like something out of McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel The Road, and he felt awful. Ahead there came a bright amber glow over the tree line, thick fingers of black smoke worrying the sky. From his office on the west side of Knoxville, Morgan rushed southward out of the city, across the Tennessee River and up into the first foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, where the road narrowed back through a hollow, reaching deep into the Appalachia thicket. It came on a Tuesday evening in January 2009. got the call that the author Cormac McCarthy’s house was burning.
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