Oprah Gets 'Road' Author To Open Up

CHICAGO, June 5 -- Oprah Winfrey got Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy to do the one thing he hates most: talk about his work.

"You probably shouldn't be talking about it, you probably should be doing it," the 73-year-old author told Winfrey in a rare TV interview, which aired Tuesday on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

The interview follows Winfrey's announcement in March that she had chosen McCarthy's "The Road" for her book club.

During the interview, taped at the Santa Fe Institute, McCarthy said that while typically he doesn't know what generates the ideas for his books, he can trace "The Road," this year's winner of the Pulitzer for fiction, to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso about four years ago. Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night, his son asleep nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.

"I just had this image of these fires up on the hill . . . and I thought a lot about my little boy," he said. He wrote some of his thoughts down and didn't really think about it again until he was in Ireland a few years later and the novel, about a man and his son as they wander through a barren post-nuclear landscape, came to him.

Having a child as an older man also had its effect on McCarthy. "It wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things fresh," he said. "It forces the world on you, and I think it's a good thing."

Winfrey could not seem to get over how little McCarthy seemed to care about success, that it didn't matter to him that millions of people read his books now compared with a few thousand in years past.

"You are a different kind of author, let me tell you," she said, chuckling.

Winfrey also announced that "Middlesex," Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was her latest selection. The book is an epic about a Greek American who is a hermaphrodite.