McCarthy, Cormac 1933-

(Charles Mccarthy, Jr.)

PERSONAL:

Born July 20, 1933, in Providence, RI; son of Charles Joseph and Gladys McCarthy; married Lee Holleman, 1961 (divorced); married Anne de Lisle, 1967 (divorced); married Jennifer Winkley, 1998; children: (first marriage) Cullen. Education: Attended University of Tennessee, four years.

ADDRESSES:

Home—El Paso, TX. Agent—Amanda Urban, International Creative Management, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

CAREER:

Writer. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1953-56.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Ingram-Merrill Foundation grant for creative writing, 1960; American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship to Europe, 1965-66; William Faulkner Foundation award, 1965, for The Orchard Keeper; Rockefeller Foundation grant, 1966; Guggenheim fellowship, 1976; MacArthur Foundation grant, 1981; Jean Stein Award, American Academy and Institution of Arts and Letters, 1991; National Book Award for fiction, 1992, and National Book Critics Award for fiction, both for All the Pretty Horses; Lyndhurst Foundation grant; Institute of Arts and Letters award.

WRITINGS:

The Orchard Keeper, Random House (New York, NY), 1965.

Outer Dark, Random House (New York, NY), 1968.

Child of God, Random House (New York, NY), 1974.

The Gardener's Son (teleplay; produced as part of Visions series, Public Broadcasting System, 1977), published as The Gardener's Son: A Screenplay, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1996.

Suttree, Random House (New York, NY), 1979, reprinted, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2002.

Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, Random House (New York, NY), 1985, reprinted with an introduction by Harold Bloom, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2001.

All the Pretty Horses (book one in the "Border Trilogy"), Random House (New York, NY), 1992.

The Crossing (book two in the "Border Trilogy"), Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

Cities of the Plain (book three in the "Border Trilogy"), Random House (New York, NY), 1998.

The Border Trilogy (contains All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain), Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

No Country for Old Men, Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

The Sunset Limited: A Play in One Act, Vintage International (New York, NY), 2006.

The Road, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of the play The Stonemason. Contributor to Yale Review and Sewanee Review.

ADAPTATIONS:

All the Pretty Horses was adapted as a film, 2002; No Country for Old Men was adapted as a film; Blood Meridien and The Road have been optioned for film.

SIDELIGHTS:

Charles McCarthy, Jr., better known to readers as Cormac McCarthy, is frequently compared with such Southern-based writers as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. In a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay, Dianne L. Cox stated that McCarthy's work has in common with that of the others "a rustic and sometimes dark humor, intense characters, and violent plots; [he] shares as well their development of universal themes within a highly particularized fictional world, their seriousness of vision, and their vigorous exploration of the English language."

McCarthy's early novels were often set in eastern Tennessee, while his later work focuses on the American Southwest. He has often been singled out for his individual prose style—beautifully lyrical yet spare, eschewing commas and totally stripped of quotation marks. This style has been a source of complaint for some reviewers; in a New York Times review of McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, for example, critic Herbert Mitgang lamented: "This reader was put off at first by the author's all too writerly writing. His joined words, without hyphenation, and his unpunctuated, breathless sentences, call too much attention to themselves." Kurt Tidmore contended in the Washington Post Book World, however, that "the reader is never confused. Sentences punctuate themselves by the natural rhythm of their words. Everything is perfectly clear. The poetic never overwhelms the realistic." In addition, wrote Madison Smartt Bell in the New York Times Book Review, McCarthy's "elaborate and elevated" prose is "used effectively to frame realistic dialogue, for which his ear is deadly accurate." Bell continued: "Difficult as [McCarthy's writing] may sometimes be, it is also overwhelmingly seductive."

Throughout his career, McCarthy has actively avoided public attention, refusing to participate in lecture tours and seldom granting interviews. "Until very recently," observed Bell, "he shunned publicity so effectively that he wasn't even famous for it." Instead, he has concentrated upon crafting his unique and powerful fictions, unaffected by the critical acclaim that is heaped upon him with each new book.

In keeping with McCarthy's reclusive nature, little is known about his early life. He was born Charles McCarthy, Jr., in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933, the third of six children in an Irish Catholic family. "Sometime later, he or his family—no one seems to know which—changed his name to Cormac after Cormac MacCarthy, the Irish chieftain who built Blarney Castle," explained Texas Monthly contributor Michael Hall. When Cormac was four, he and his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father got a job as an attorney for the powerful Tennessee Valley Authority. "After high school, McCarthy studied engineering at the University of Tennessee, then entered the U.S. Air Force. He served in Alaska for a couple of years before returning to Tennessee and reentering the university. He married twice, having a son, Cullen, with his first wife, and living for a period in a renovated barn on a pig farm with his second wife. In 1976, he moved to Texas, the source of much of his inspiration for his most famous works." "In El Paso McCarthy has become a ghost celebrity, an urban legend," Hall wrote. In 1996, the Texas Monthly writer continued, several fans spent some time "going through McCarthy's trash and cataloging it … to prove that he was not some mythic desert hermit but just as urban as everyone else in the city of more than half a million." "Contrary to popular wisdom, McCarthy is not a recluse," Hall stated. "But he is and always has been an intensely private man and a reluctant public one."

McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, deals with three people—a young man who is coming of age in the Tennessee mountains, a bootlegger, and an aged orchard keeper—whose lives are intertwined, even though they do not meet until the end of the story. "Through these characters," wrote Cox, "the novel explores the relationship between individual integrity and independence achievable in the remote natural world of the mountains and the social obligations and strictures imposed by the community of men." J.G. Murray, reviewing The Orchard Keeper in America, felt that the book is interesting "because it does not seem to be autobiographical and [it] rejects the influence, more bad than good, of the Southern mystique." Murray finds McCarthy's view of adulthood "even more precise and sympathetic than his treatment of youth. And, as everyone knows, it is quite exceptional for young writers to be so objective."

Outer Dark, McCarthy's next novel, is "so centered on guilt and retribution that it is largely structured around scenes of judgment," according to Cox. Outer Dark tells the story of Culla and Rinthy, a brother and sister who suffer the consequences of their incest in very different ways. Many critics, such as Guy Davenport, compared McCarthy's style in this book to that of William Faulkner. In a New York Times Book Review article, Davenport wrote that Outer Dark "pays its homage to Faulkner," but went on to note that McCarthy's personal writing style "compels admiration, [being] compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax. In elegant counterpoint to this bare-bones English is a second diction taken from that rich store of English which is there in the dictionary to be used by those who can." A Time reviewer found that McCarthy's command of local dialect "is surpassed by his poetic descriptions of the land and its people. His is an Irish singing voice imbued with Southern Biblical intonations. The result is an antiphony of speech and verse played against a landscape of penance."

Lester Ballard, the title character of McCarthy's Child of God, is a demented backwoodsman, a murderer and necrophiliac. In this 1974 novel the author depicts the spiritual demise of Ballard and at the same time makes him a sympathetic figure. But Richard P. Brickner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described Child of God as "an essentially sentimental novel that no matter how sternly it strives to be tragic is never more than morose." Similarly, in a review for Commonweal, contributor Robert Leiter called the book "thinner [and] less full-bodied than either The Orchard Keeper or Outer Dark … Child of God is a swift exciting read, but we are left with only incisive images strung along a thin plot line, the why and wherefore unexplained." Leiter surmised that the book "will perhaps be looked upon as a bad novel written by a good writer" and concluded that "this would be regrettable, for Child of God marks a progression in McCarthy's career. He has learned restraint. The ‘old themes’ live on in him, but his South is not rendered with the precision of a realist. He has taken realism to the province of folk myth."

Child of God is "a reading experience so impressive, so ‘new’, so clearly made well that it seems almost to defy the easy esthetic categories and at the same time cause me to thrash about for some help with the necessary description of my enthusiasm," stated Doris Grumbach in New Republic, adding, "Cormac McCarthy is a Southerner, a born storyteller, … a writer of natural, impeccable dialogue, a literary child of Faulkner." Grumbach went on to say that in McCarthy's style, "the journey from death-in-life to death-in-death, from the hunted to the discovery of the hunting … is accomplished in rare, spare, precise yet poetic prose." The reviewer felt the author "has allowed us direct communion with his special kind of chaos; every sentence he writes illuminates, if only for a moment, the great dark of madness and violence and inevitable death that surrounds us all."

In a New Yorker review of Child of God, Robert Coles compared McCarthy to ancient Greek dramatists, saying that he "simply writes novels that tell us we cannot comprehend the riddles of human idiosyncrasy, the influence of the merely contingent or incidental upon our lives. He is a novelist of religious feeling who appears to subscribe to no creed but who cannot stop wondering in the most passionate and honest way what gives life meaning…. From the isolated highlands of Tennessee he sends us original stories that show how mysterious or confusing the world is. Moreover, his mordant wit, his stubborn refusal to bend his writing to the literary and intellectual demands of our era, conspire at times to make him seem mysterious and confusing—a writer whose fate is to be relatively unknown and often misinterpreted. But both Greek playwrights and Christian theologians have been aware that such may be the fate of anyone, of even the most talented and sensitive of human beings."

McCarthy's fourth novel, Suttree, again focuses on a misfit character, Cornelius Suttree, and the undesirable society he inhabits. In this book, the author describes Suttree as a man who has spent years in "the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees." Reviewing the book in Spectator, Frank Rudman called McCarthy "a magnificent writer with a resonant style that moves easily and naturally into a grand register without losing truthfulness. His ear for dialogue is as funny and authentic as that of Mark Twain." Davenport pointed out possible autobiographical elements in the novel and wondered if McCarthy "had asked what part of himself bears the imprint of the world in which he was raised, and answered himself by witnessing what these traits look like exemplified by a gallery of characters ranging from near-idiotic to noble." Writing in National Review, Davenport noted further that the reader is "won over … to Cormac McCarthy's radically original way with tone and his sense of the aloneness of people in their individuality. At the heart of Suttree there is a strange sense of transformation and rebirth in which the protagonist wanders in a forest, sees visions, and emerges as a stranger to all that was before familiar. This is a scene no one else could have written."

Anatole Broyard wrote of the author in a New York Times review of Suttree: "His people are so vivid that they seem exotic, but this is just another way of saying that we tend to forget the range of human differences. Mr. McCarthy's hyperbole is not Southern rhetoric, but flesh and blood. Every tale is tall, if you look at it closely enough." In Washington Post Book World, Edward Rothstein added another dollop of praise: "It is a measure … of McCarthy's skills that the reader becomes engaged with those of [Suttree's] world, even intoxicated by the miasmatic language. For every image that is tiresomely weighty, there is one which illuminates dark crevices. For every horror, there is a sensitive observation. For every violent dislocation, there is a subtly touching dialogue or gesture." Nelson Algren compared Suttree with McCarthy's earlier work, noting in the Chicago Tribune Books: "There were no telephones, indoor plumbing, electricity, or TV in [his] previous novels…. The language of his people was closer to the time of Shakespeare than to our own time. Here he has brought them all to town and into today—without losing the sense of old, old America. And without losing the freshness and the magic of the old wilderness. Although his new wilderness is an industrial wasteland, the magic remains."

In his next novel, 1985's Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West, McCarthy leaves his home territory of Tennessee for the dusty plains of the Old West, a change possibly the result of the author's own relocation to El Paso, Texas, in 1974. Blood Meridian is by far McCarthy's bloodiest novel to date, detailing the adventures of a fourteen-year-old boy referred to only as "the kid" as he travels with a band of bounty hunters, paid by a Mexican governor to collect Indian scalps. The hunters, however, are not picky about their victims, leaving a long, bloody trail behind them as they go. "Blood Meridian comes at the reader like a slap in the face," wrote Caryn James in the New York Times Book Review. "While [it] is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore."

Though Blood Meridian is based loosely upon actual events of the 1840s and 1850s, it bears little resemblance to the historical westerns written by Louis L'Amour and others; instead it concentrates on the barren, hellish landscape and near-surreal characters that make up the band of mercenaries. Most prominent among them is a huge, hairless man named Judge Holden. Though he is not the group's leader, "the Judge" commands the respect of the others as he pontificates by the fire each night. It is against the background of Judge Holden that the kid is placed, allowing the reader to evaluate for himself the morality of each character. "Blood Meridian stands the world of Louis L'Amour on its head (indeed, heaps hot coals upon it)," claimed Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Tom Nolan.

It is important to note, however, that the brutality depicted in McCarthy's writing has not reduced its power; rather, according to James, he "has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality; his elaborate language invents a world hinged between the real and surreal, jolting us out of complacency."

Winner of the National Book Award, All the Pretty Horses is the first installment in a three-book epic titled "The Border Trilogy." Set in 1949, it tells the story of John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old Texan who, along with his friend, Lacey Rawlins, sets off on horseback for Mexico. It becomes a coming-of-age tale, with Cole learning the skills of survival, facing adversity, and finding romance, all set against the backdrop of a land that has not lost the magic of the old West. "In the hands of some other writer," noted Bell, "this material might make for a combination of Lonesome Dove and Huckleberry Finn, but Mr. McCarthy's vision is deeper than Larry McMurtry's and, in its own way, darker than Mark Twain's." "What he has given us is a book of remarkable beauty and strength," wrote Tidmore, "the work of a master in perfect command of his medium."

While All the Pretty Horses is almost universally considered one of McCarthy's most accessible novels, it did not receive universally favorable reviews. This is due, in part, to the popularity of the novel, which opened it to criticism by reviewers previously unfamiliar with McCarthy's work. While Richard Eder, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, admitted that "McCarthy's elevated prose does wonders for deserts, mountains, freezing winds, night landscapes and the tangibility of food, a bath and clean clothes," he warned that "loftiness gusts like a capsizing high wind, and the writing can choke on its own ornateness." Still, the strength of All the Pretty Horses seems to lie in the integrity of its central character, Cole, who was described by Bruce Allen in the World & I as "both a credible and admirable character; he is a perfect vehicle for the expression of the novel's themes." In addition to winning the National Book Award and garnering its author much greater critical attention, All the Pretty Horses also proved to be a tremendous commercial success.

The second installment in McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," 1994's The Crossing covers much of the same geographical and emotional terrain as All the Pretty Horses. The Crossing is divided into three sections. In the first, Billy Parham attempts to trap a wolf that has been killing cattle on his family's New Mexico ranch. After he successfully catches the animal, Billy decides to return it to its original territory in Mexico rather than kill it. Billy thus crosses the border into Mexico for the first time in the novel; unfortunately, the wolf is stolen for use in a dog-fighting arena, and Billy has to kill it to end its painful circumstance. After burying the wolf, Billy returns home to find that horse thieves have murdered his parents. The novel's second section finds Billy and his brother, Boyd, again crossing the border into Mexico in search of their parents' killers and their stolen horses. The brothers find and reclaim some of the horses, battle bandits, and have other picaresque adventures. At the close of the section, Boyd falls in love and returns home with a Mexican woman. In the third section, Billy decides after two years to journey back into Mexico to find Boyd. After hearing a song in which Boyd's death is described, Billy locates his brother's body and returns to New Mexico to bury it on his family's ranch.

As happened with All the Pretty Horses, critical reaction to The Crossing was starkly divided, with some reviewers terming the book an American masterpiece and others criticizing it as overwritten and pretentious. Writing in the Chicago Tribune Books, Allen dubbed it an "ambitious novel" that "offers a masterly display of tonal control and some of the most pitch-perfect rapturous prose being written these days." In particular, Allen praised the "dozens of breathtakingly imaginative descriptive passages" in the book. In contrast, Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Eder echoed his comments about All the Pretty Horses. Admitting that "McCarthy is a strong writer and he can be a magical one," Eder stated: "There are splendid passages in The Crossing." However, the critic also criticized the author's portrayal of Mexico and disapproved of his frequent use of untranslated passages in Spanish. "What is painfully weak," averred Eder, "is much of McCarthy's portrayal and use of Mexico; and it is a very serious weakness." Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, also disliked the novel, commenting that "the overall result is not a mythic, post-modernist masterpiece, but a hodge-podge of a book that is derivative, sentimental and pretentious all at once." At the other end of the critical divide, New York Times Book Review contributor Robert Hass declared The Crossing to be "a miracle in prose, an American original. It deserves to sit on the same shelf certainly with [Toni Morrison's] Beloved and [William Faulkner's] As I Lay Dying." Commending the novel's "violent and stunningly beautiful, inconsolable landscapes," Hass called The Crossing "a masterwork."

The trilogy concluded with 1998's Cities of the Plain. The last installment in the series unites John Grady Cole, the protagonist of All the Pretty Horses, with The Crossing's Billy Parham. Set in New Mexico in the 1950s, the novel finds both men working as horse wranglers at the Cross Fours Ranch. Like the previous books in the trilogy, Cities of the Plain contains plenty of tight dialogue, cowboy philosophy, extreme violence, and carefully rendered descriptions of the Western landscape. As in All the Pretty Horses, the plot comes to focus on romance—in this case, Cole's doomed love for Magdalena, an epileptic Mexican prostitute whose affections are also coveted by her pimp, Eduardo. When Cole's attempt to purchase Magdalena from her boss fails, he plots instead to smuggle her across the Mexican border. After Eduardo learns of the planned escape, however, he arranges to have Magdalena kidnapped and killed. Despite Billy's efforts to keep Cole out of trouble, the younger man returns to the brothel, seeking retribution for Magdalena's death. He enters into a knife fight with Eduardo, a battle which results in the deaths of both men.

Critics responded to the concluding volume of the "Border Trilogy" with mixed reactions. Review ofContemporary Fiction critic Brian Evenson found that despite "some exceptional manipulations of prose," the novel "fails to measure up to either of the two previous volumes." Chilton Williamson, Jr., writing in the National Review concurred that "Cities of the Plain in some ways makes a less than fitting conclusion to the trilogistic narrative"—although the critic noted that "over three volumes [McCarthy's] writing has lost none of its eloquence nor the description its particularist power." In his assessment of the narrative for World Literature Today, William Riggan unfavorably compared its "leisurely, measured, elegiac … and dull" pacing and tone with the "action-rich, dialogue-filled, character-driven Horses" and The Crossing. By contrast, Time reviewer R.Z. Sheppard applauded McCarthy's efforts "to do for cowpunching what Melville did for whaling: describe in documentary detail how the job is done," and called the author "a virtuoso of the lyric description and the free-range sentence."

Seven years after completing the "Border Trilogy," McCarthy published No Country for Old Men. A year later, his book The Road was also released. Although No Country for Old Men. was met with decidedly mixed reviews, The Road received nearly universal praise. The latter book is the story of an unnamed man and his unnamed young son. Set in a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter, the two protagonists struggle to find food and attempt to avoid their fellow survivors, most of whom have become violent and cannibalistic. As the climate becomes colder, the protagonists begin to head south, hoping to make it to a warmer place before they freeze to death. Amidst this framework, the father and son bond is portrayed through the familiar—yet entirely skewed—road trip milieu, serving as an illustration of that which makes humanity human, and that which makes it inhuman as well. Though the father and son call themselves ‘good guys’ because they are not cannibals, they are unable to help others in need—they are barely able to survive themselves. This conundrum plays out in the boy's youthful and absolute sense of morality; his struggle to come to terms with this and other such contradictions is one of the book's major themes. According to Booklist contributor Keir Graff, the story is "rich with other explorations, too: hope in the face of hopelessness, the ephemeral nature of our existence, the vanishing worlds we all carry within us."

The book was called a masterpiece by several critics, including Entertainment Weekly reviewer Jennifer Reese. As did many critics, Reese remarked upon the story's conclusion, which simultaneously indicates the end of all mankind and hints at the prospect of a new age. Indeed, "the extraordinarily lovely and sad final pages … embrace both terrible possibilities," she stated. Norm Pattis, writing in the Connecticut Law Tribune, expressed dismayed surprise at the novel's somewhat hopeful ending. Nevertheless, Pattis acknowledged "perhaps that is McCarthy's point: To be is to hope, even when hope is pointless and there is nothing for which to hope." New York Times critic Janet Maslin also sought to explain The Road's powerful ending, calling it "an embrace of faith in the face of no hope whatsoever." Maslin noted that this "leap" "adds immeasurably to the staying power of a book that is simple yet mysterious, simultaneously cryptic and crystal clear." After calling McCarthy "the elemental prose stylist of our time," Esquire contributor Tom Chiarella went on to state: "you shouldn't read this book for the metaphoric possibilities of change in the life of mankind…. You should read this book because it is exactly what a book about our future ought to be: the knife wound of our inconvenient truths."

Despite his groundbreaking success, McCarthy remains elusive. Summarizing his work, Cox stressed: "McCarthy is in no way a commercial writer. He is a novelist by profession, and he has not supplemented his income by turning his hand to more lucrative kinds of work such as Hollywood screenwriting…. His most perceptive reviewers have consistently predicted more of the same solid work from McCarthy, and he has fulfilled these predictions. He deserves, now, serious attention from students of literature."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bell, Vereen, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1988.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 57, 1990, Volume 59, 1990, Volume 101, 1997.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 6: American Novelists since World War II, Second Series, 1980, Volume 143: American Novelists since World War II, Third Series, 1994.

Hall, Wade H., and Rick Wallach, editors, Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy: Selected Essays from the First McCarthy Conference, University of Texas at El Paso (El Paso, TX), 1995.

McCarthy, Cormac, Suttree, Random House (New York, NY), 1979.

PERIODICALS

America, June 12, 1965, J.G. Murray, review of The Orchard Keeper; October 31, 2005, Chris Byrd, review of No Country for Old Men.

Booklist, January 1, 1999, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 779; August 1, 2006, Keir Graff, review of The Road, p. 9.

Commonweal, March 29, 1974, Robert Leiter, review of Child of God.

Connecticut Law Tribune, October 23, 2006, Norm Pattis, review of The Road.

Entertainment Weekly, July 22, 2005, Jennifer Reese, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 82; September 29, 2006, Jennifer Reese, review of The Road, p. 85.

Esquire, September, 2006, Tom Chiarella, review of The Road, p. 94.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 9 1985, Tom Nolan, review of Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West; May 17, 1992, Richard Eder, review of All the Pretty Horses; June 12, 1994, Richard Eder, review of The Crossing, p. 3.

Nation, July 6, 1998, Dagoberto Glib, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 38.

National Review, March 16, 1979, Gut Davenport, review of Suttree; October 12, 1998, Chilton Williamson, Jr., review of Cities of the Plain, p. 61.

New Republic, February 9, 1974, Doris Grumbach, review of Child of God.

New Statesman, November 14, 2005, Ruaridh Nicoll, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 54.

New Yorker, August 26, 1974, Robert Coles, review of Child of God.

New York Times, January 20, 1979, Anatole Broyard, review of Suttree; November 19, 1992, Herbert Mitgang, review of All the Pretty Horses; June 21, 1994, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Crossing, p. C21; September 25, 2006, Janet Maslin, review of The Road, p. E1.

New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1968, Guy Davenport, review of Outer Dark; January 13, 1974, Richard P. Brickner, review of Child of God; April 28, 1985, Caryn James, review of Blood Meridian; May 17, 1992, Madison Smartt Bell, review of All the Pretty Horses; June 12, 1994, Robert Hass, review of The Crossing, p. 1.

Newsweek, July 25, 2005, Malcolm Jones, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 58; September 25, 2006, review of The Road, p. 68.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1998, Brian Evenson, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 250.

Spectator, May 24, 1980, Frank Rudman, review of Suttree.

Texas Monthly, July, 1998, Michael Hall, "Desperately Seeking Cormac," pp. 76-79.

Time, September 17, 1968, review of Outer Dark; May 18, 1998, R.Z. Sheppard, "Thar She Moos," review of Cities of the Plain, p. 95; July 18, 2005, Lev Grossman, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 73.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), January 28, 1979, Nelson Algren, review of Suttree; June 26, 1994, Bruce Allen, review of The Crossing, p. 5.

Vanity Fair, August, 2005, Richard B. Woodward, "Cormac McCarthy Would Rather Hang Out with Physicists than Other Writers," author interview and profile, p. 98.

Vogue, August, 2005, Taylor Antrim, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 164.

Washington Post, November 19, 1992, Kurt Tidmore, review of All the Pretty Horses.

Washington Post Book World, March 19, 1979, Edward Rothstein, review of Suttree.

World & I, September, 1992, Bruce Allen, review of All the Pretty Horses; October, 1998, Edwin T. Arnold, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 258.

World Literature Today, winter, 2000, William Riggan, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 173.