As a teenager, he wrote to Bette Davis, whose work he greatly admired; they shared a correspondence which he recounted in a 2016 article in the Washington Post.

[1] A gay writer,[2] he was the author of Mother of Sorrows, a collection of linked stories that novelist Michael Cunningham has described as unbearably beautiful.

McCann's book of poems, Ghost Letters, won the 1994 Beatrice Hawley and Capricorn Poetry awards.

McCann was associated with the town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he lived intermittently since the 1970s and where he served on the board of trustees of the Fine Arts Work Center.

He served on the board of directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in Washington, D.C., and was a Member of the Corporation of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York.