Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy was an American novelist whose work moved from the isolated communities of the southern Appalachians to the deserts and borderlands of Texas and Mexico. Born in Rhode Island in 1933 and raised near Knoxville, Tennessee, he served in the United States Air Force and studied at the University of Tennessee before devoting himself to writing. His early novels, including The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree, combine Southern Gothic settings with themes of poverty, violence, alienation and survival. McCarthy died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2023.

McCarthy’s Western fiction includes Blood Meridian, a brutal reworking of nineteenth-century expansion and violence along the American–Mexican frontier, and the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. All the Pretty Horses won the 1992 National Book Award, while The Road, a post-apocalyptic story about a father and son, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He also wrote No Country for Old Men, The Passenger and Stella Maris. His novels are distinguished by austere dialogue, biblical rhythms and an unsentimental examination of landscape, morality and the violence underlying American history.