Reclusive Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Cormac McCarthy emerged Tuesday for a much-anticipated interview with popular talk show host Oprah Winfrey.

In March, Winfrey selected McCarthy's novel The Road for her book club. She admitted that the dark title was an unusual selection, but hailed the book as "so extraordinary."

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey conducted Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy's first-ever television interview, which aired on Tuesday.
(Harpo Productions/Associated Press)

The bleak story follows a man and his son as they struggle to cross a barren terrain following a catastrophe that has left the land largely dead.

Although he doesn't have anything against the media, McCarthy said, he doesn't believe in talking about his craft.

"I don't think it's good for your head," McCarthy told Winfrey in his first-ever TV interview, taped earlier at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and broadcast on Winfrey's hit daytime show Tuesday.

"You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn't be talking about it. You probably should be doing it," said the 73-year-old U.S. writer, whose credits also include Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses.

McCarthy, often hailed as one of America's greatest living writers, discussed a range of topics with the Chicago host during the interview, including the poverty he experienced in his past, becoming a father late in life and how his son inspired The Road.

While McCarthy said he doesn't usually know where his ideas originate, he told Winfrey he could trace the beginnings of the post-apocalyptic novel from a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, about four years ago.

As his son slept, he looked out the hotel window, began to imagine the terrain 50 or 100 years into the future and took time to scratch out some notes. On a later trip to Ireland, he said, he realized his notes were the kernel of a new book.

The Road, which McCarthy described as a "pretty simple, straightforward story," was published in September 2006 and won this year's Pulitzer Prize for Literature.

The author, who rarely gives interviews, also revealed to Winfrey that he enjoys writing and doesn't care how many people read his work, as long as they appreciate it.

"Some writers have said in print that they hated writing, it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it," he said.

"Sometimes it's difficult, but you always have this image of the perfect thing, which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve."

Middlesex next on Oprah's list

Winfrey also revealed on Tuesday that she has picked another Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as her next book club choice: Middlesex, the sophomore title from The Virgin Suicides author Jeffrey Eugenides. Published in 2002, the book tells a multi-generational tale revolving around Cal, a Greek-American teen who discovers that she is a hermaphrodite.

"I promise it will grab you from the first sentence," Winfrey told her audience.

Books Winfrey chooses for her televised book club are typically propelled into U.S. bestseller status. The club has approximately 700,000 registered members.

With files from the Associated Press