Massad Ayoob described a Smithsonian profile of novelist Cormac McCarthy that showed the Pulitzer winner kept more than twenty thousand books, many of them on firearms, and sketched his own designs for tools to cut rifling into barrels.

McCarthy’s brother Dennis told writer Richard Grant that the author treated leaving home unarmed the same way he treated leaving without something to read, linking the habit to a rural Southern upbringing that saw the world as hazardous. McCarthy had trapped muskrats near Knoxville for pelts and became known as an expert on antique American rifles.

His novel Blood Meridian, set in 1850 and based on more than three hundred history volumes, contains a scene in which a gang acquires a crate of Colt Dragoon percussion revolvers whose size, weight, and power McCarthy described in technical detail.