An important issue of TriQuarterly, containing the first appearance in any format of Cormac McCarthy’s western novel Blood Meridian, an excerpt titled “The scalphunters. The excerpt was eventually developed into Chapter 12 of Blood Meridian. The fortune pages story contains significant textual variations from the finished text. Portions of the text were omitted, reworked, and expanded within the five year prior to the book’s publication in 1985.                                                  

It precedes a little known publication of a Blood Meridian excerpt in Westward, the Sunday Magazine section of the Dallas Times Herald, on October, 1981. McCarthy quotes it in a letter to Orin Borsten,  dated October (or November) 28, 1981. The excerpt, titled “The Judge”, was published by Chris Wohlwend, a journalist from Knoxville and McCarthy’s admirer, who has became editor of the magazine. His account of the circumstances of publication and how McCarthy’s got $1,000 for the excerpt is in an article published in Substack in January 2025 (Cormac McCarthy & the Manhattan Project, https://substack.com/home/post/p-153908426 ).

The TriQuarterly issue was devoted to the new Western fiction and includes contributions by Richard Ford, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey and Leslie Marmon Silko. McCarthy mentions it in a two pages typed letter to “Janet” offered by the book dealer Quill & Brush on 2018. The letter has no date but  it is dateable at Spring or Summer 1980: “No, I don’t have a title for the western [Blood Meridian] yet. A few tentative ones, but nothing definite. There is an excerpt from the book in the new issue of the Tri-Quarterly – a review published at Northwestern. It’s a special issue devoted to western stories – you might see it in one of the bookstores there”.   

TriQuarterly journal was established in 1958as an undergraduate magazine remembered today for publishing the work of the young Saul Bellow. It was reshaped in 1964 by Charles Newman as an innovative national publication aimed at a sophisticated and diverse literary readership. Northwestern University Press, the university’s scholarly publishing arm, operated the journal. The journal was so named because of its original form as a student magazine was published in each of the three quarters of Northwestern’s academic year, and not in the fourth quarter, summer. In 2010 TriQuarterly become an online publication mainly run by students and not professionals.

COLLECTING TOPICS: unsigned copies are increasingly uncommon, but can be found at a reasonable price. Signed copies are rare. I have come across two of them only. One was offered for $6,500 by an American dealer who, since the McCarthy’s death, has listed a huge number of books pretending to be signed by the author of Blood Meridian. Unfortunately, all of them didn’t have a strong provenance and  some were very disputable. The other copy, whose signature seems genuine to me, is part of an important private American collection.