Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy, born in 1933, American novelist best known for his Border Trilogy, a series of novels set along the border between the United States and Mexico. Most of McCarthy’s writings explore violence in the lives of people uprooted by social change.

Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., was born in Providence, Rhode Island. He took the name Cormac after an Irish king. At the age of four, he moved with his family to a rural area near Knoxville, Tennessee. His father was a lawyer, and he grew up in comfortable circumstances. After graduating from a Roman Catholic high school in Knoxville, McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee for one year. In 1953, McCarthy joined the United States Air Force for four years and served in Alaska for two of those years. Following his military service, he returned to the University of Tennessee to study literature, but he left before graduating. McCarthy published two short stories during this time.

McCarthy’s early novels depict the lives of the poor in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), weaves together the stories of three characters who are linked by the body of a murder victim buried in a peach orchard. The William Faulkner Foundation named the book the best first novel by an American in 1965. In 1968 McCarthy published Outer Dark, a novel about an incestuous brother and sister who wander through the countryside in search of their lost child. Child of God (1974) tells the story of a rural outcast’s descent into madness, sexual perversion, and murder. It was based on actual events. Suttree (1979) explores the colorful but ultimately tragic world of Knoxville’s slums.

In 1982 McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas, and the setting of his next novels moved to the Old West. Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (1985) focuses on a band of 19th-century adventurers who kill Native Americans for profit in the southwestern United States and Mexico. Many of McCarthy’s admirers consider Blood Meridian his finest work.

All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first installment in the Border Trilogy, chronicles the adventures of a young American in Mexico. All the Pretty Horses won both the National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The second installment in the Border Trilogy, The Crossing (1994), tells the story of a young man’s coming of age during three trips to Mexico before and during World War II (1939-1945). Cities of the Plain (1998), the final installment, brings together the central characters of the previous volumes on a ranch in the Southwest. McCarthy’s later novels include No Country for Old Men (2005), a bleak and violent tale, and The Road (2006), which narrates the journey of a father and son through a devastated world.

Intensely private and wary of personal publicity, McCarthy has rarely granted interviews or read from his works in public. In 1981 he received a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation. In addition to his novels, McCarthy’s works include The Gardener’s Son (1977), a television screenplay, The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts (1994), and the play The Sunset Limited (2006). In 2000, All the Pretty Horses was made into a motion picture directed by Billy Bob Thornton.