McCarthy, Cormac 1933- (Charles McCarthy, Charles McCarthy, Jr.)

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McCarthy, Cormac 1933- (Charles McCarthy, 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, (third marriage) John. 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; Pulitzer Prize for fiction, James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, Quill Award for general fiction, and Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection, all 2007, all for The Road.

WRITINGS:

The Orchard Keeper, Random House (New York, NY), 1965 reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1993.

Outer Dark, Random House (New York, NY), 1968, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1993.

Child of God, Random House (New York, NY), 1974, reprinted, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1993.

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.

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

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

The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Also author of the play The Stonemason. Contributor to James Drake, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 2008. Contributor to Yale Review and Sewanee Review.

THE "BORDER TRILOGY"

All the Pretty Horses (also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1992.

The Crossing (also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1994.

Cities of the Plain (also see below), 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.

ADAPTATIONS:

All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road have been adapted for film. Authors' books have also been adapted for audio, including No Country for Old Men and The Road Recorded Books, 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Cormac McCarthy is frequently compared with such Southern writers as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor. A Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor 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." "His characters are often outcasts—destitutes or criminals, or both," wrote Richard B. Woodward in the New York Times Magazine. "Death, which announces itself often, reaches down from the open sky, abruptly, with a slashed throat or a bullet in the face. The abyss opens up at any misstep."

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. McCarthy has been described by Woodward as "a cult figure with a reputation as a writer's writer" who is, perhaps, "the best unknown novelist in America."

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 don't meet until the end of the story. "Through these characters," wrote a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor, "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, commented 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 found 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 a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor. 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."

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 noted 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 comment 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 also wrote that 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." Coles went on to write in the same review: "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." Guy 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 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, Woodward pointed out, it "has distinct echoes of Moby Dick, McCarthy's favorite book," for 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.

In defense of the meticulously detailed gore that pervades his novels, McCarthy told New York Times Magazine contributor Woodward: "There's no such thing as life without bloodshed." The author went on to note: "I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." Most importantly, though, 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."

"By comparison with the sonority and carnage of Blood Meridian," wrote Woodward, "the world of All the Pretty Horses is less risky—repressed but sane." 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. 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." Watching Cole adhere to his values in the face of near-insurmountable adversity gives All the Pretty Horses "a sustained innocence and a lucidity new in McCarthy's work," according to Woodward. 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 with 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, Bruce 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. Michiko Kakutani, contributor to 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.

Critics responded to the concluding volume of the "Border Trilogy" with mixed reactions. The Review of Contemporary Fiction's 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 commented 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 contributor 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."

Despite the groundbreaking success of his "Border Trilogy," McCarthy remains elusive. He is, as Woodward wrote, "a radical conservative who still believes that the novel can, in his words, ‘encompass all the various disciplines and interests of humanity.’" Summarizing his work, a Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor 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." The contributor also noted: "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."

McCarthy followed the critical and popular success of the "Border Trilogy" novels with two sparse but powerful novels that have further enhanced his reputation both among critics and the reading public. McCarthy's 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, was called "a mesmerizing modern-day western" by a Publishers Weekly contributor. Set in 1980 in southwest Texas, the novel revolves around the discovery in the desert of drug deal gone bad. Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam War veteran, comes upon several dead bodies, a stash of heroin, and nearly two and a half million dollars in cash.

In this "bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate," as the novel was described by a Kirkus Reviews contributor, the reader follows Moss as he is pursued by a philosophizing psychopath named Anton Chigurh, who is out to get the drug cartel's money. However, Chigurh decides to double cross his employers, which leads to the cartel hiring Carson Wells, an ex Army Special Forces soldier now working as a freelance gun for hire. Also involved in the case is Sheriff Bell, an older lawman who sees the entire affair as indicative of the world going to ruin. "The book is both a pacey modern western and an imagining of how Sheriff Bell, forty-one years in office without a murder left unsolved, deals with the modern horror," noted a New Statesman contributor.

Although reviewers did not rank No Country for Old Men among McCarthy's best novels, such as Suttree and Blood Meridian, the novel still received widespread praise. "The ending, as haunting as it is unexpected, will sit with you long after you've left your beach chair," wrote Taylor Antrim in Vogue. Tom Chiarella, writing a review of No Country for Old Men in Esquire, noted that the author's "prose [is] the most laudable, his characters the most fully inhabited, his sense of place the most … thoroughly felt of any living writer's." Several reviewers also noted that No Country for Old Men is different significantly from the author's earlier novels of the American West. Referring to the novel as "perhaps McCarthy's most contemporary fiction," Spectator contributor Robert Edric went on to write in the same review that, unlike some of the author's "experiments with prose and narrative style … [No Country for Old Men] sees a return to the far simpler structures of Child of God and Outer Dark, where the unfolding tension and speed of events engage the reader, and where the prose is paced and tempered accordingly." Calling the book "unlike any of his others," Jack Sexton also wrote in Quadrant that it is his "most readable" novel.

In McCarthy's next novel, The Road, the violence and mayhem of No Country for Old Men rises to disastrous proportions as "the Man and the Boy" wander "the countryside, trying to find food and simply survive … after a manmade disaster, probably an atomic bomb, destroyed the world as we know it" wrote Kliatt reviewer Nola Theiss. Similar to the "kid" in Blood Meridian, the novel's protagonists are never named except as the "Man" and the "Boy." "He and his father trudge along the road, pushing an old shopping cart with their meager belongings, following an old map, avoiding ‘the bad guys,’ looking for food and heading for the coast. Their inventiveness, their love for each other, and their sheer endurance are symbols of hope.

They encounter many a horrific situation, but always they have each other" continued Theiss. "The horror (of their suffering) … is unrelieved, and we feel that McCarthy, our great chronicler of violence, is filling out his oeuvre with a projection of ultimate destruction," wrote Todd Shy in the Christian Century. National Catholic Reporter contributor Tom Ryan added that McCarthy portrays post-apocalyptic suffering "with bleak, precise eloquence that builds anticipation and gradually accelerates readers toward an unexpected conclusion."

The Road was well received by many critics and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. "Cormac McCarthy has crafted a lean fable in this book that spells out the horrors we may face in our atomic future, but he also gives us hope for our continuance with the story of a father who gives all to his son, and a stranger who takes the father's place when all seems lost." wrote John B. Breslin in America. Spectator contributor Sebastian Smee wrote: "More than an allegory or fantasy, The Road is a frighteningly credible novel. In some ways, I wish I had not read it."

In The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form, published in 2006, the author once again features two unnamed characters. In fact, "White" and "Black" are the novel's only characters. Having met after White tried to kill himself by jumping in front of a subway only to have Black save him, the white man and black man sit and talk about the meaning of existence. The white man is a jaded intellectual who wishes for death as a way to escape a meaningless life while the black man, an ex-convict and drug addict, is a born-again Christian who maintains that there is hope in the world. "The sparse and minimal setting, created through McCarthy's careful, pointed craftsmanship, consistently fills this bizarre yet profound conversation with energy," wrote Avi Kramer in Kliatt. Writing in Texas Monthly, Mike Shea noted that the author's "passionate word craft transcends all staginess."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

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

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

Dictionary of Literary Biography, 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

All Things Considered, July 28, 2005, "Review: Cormac McCarthy's Novel ‘No Country for Old Men.’"

America, June 12, 1965, J.G. Murray, review of The Orchard Keeper; October 31, 2005, "Man on the Run," p. 26; January 29, 2007, John B. Breslin, "From These Ashes," p. 24.

ANQ, fall, 2006, "‘In a Dark Parody’ of John Bunyan's the Pilgrim's Progress: The Presence of Subversive Allegory in Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark."

Atlantic Monthly, August, 1994, "Cormac McCarthy's Bizarre Genius: A Reclusive Master of Language and the Picaresque, on a Roll," p. 89; November, 2006, review of The Road, p. 125.

Book, July 1, 2003, "Bordering on Completion," p. 13.

Booklist, May 1, 1994, review of The Stonemason, p. 1576; May 15, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 1645; September 15, 1996, review of The Gardener's Son, p. 200; April 15, 1998, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 1356; January 1, 1999, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 779; June 1, 2001, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 1906; May 15, 2005, "When Old Is New Again," p. 1613; November 1, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 67; August 1, 2006, review of The Road, p. 9; January 1, 2007, review of The Road, p. 128.

Bookseller, July 8, 2005, "I'm Loving …," p. 13; November 11, 2005, "Bloody Prose: McCarthy: A Strong Dose of Texan Grit," p. 42; November 25, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 15; November 3, 2006, "On the Road: Critics Carry a Torch for Cormac McCarthy," p. 46.

Buffalo News, November 16, 2007, review of No Country for Old Men; December 14, 2007, review of No Country for Old Men.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, January 14, 2008, "Texas School Nets Cormac McCarthy Papers."

Chicago Tribune, December 21, 2000, review of All the Pretty Horses; March 29, 2007, "Oprah's Selection a Real Shocker."

Christian Century, June 13, 2006, "Novel Suggestions," p. 7; March 6, 2007, Todd Shy, review of The Road, p. 38.

Christianity and Literature, spring, 2004, "Redemption as Language in Cormac McCarthy's Suttree."

Christian Science Monitor, June 11, 1992, Richard Ryan, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 13; July 12, 2005, "A Modern, More Brutal Western; Cormac McCarthy Writes of Drug Dealers and Hit Men Instead of Cowboys," p. 16.

CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 13, 2007, "The Limits of Hope," p. 818.

Commonweal, March 29, 1974, Robert Leiter, review of Child of God, p. 90; September 25, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 29; November 4, 1994, review of The Stonemason, p. 11; December 2, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 29; December 1, 2006, Matthew Boudway, review of The Road, p. 19.

Connecticut Law Tribune, September 26, 2005, "Finding Meaning in a World Tugged by Despair and Grief"; October 23, 2006, "A Father and His Son and a World Undone."

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1997, "‘Beyond Reckoning’: Cormac McCarthy's Version of the West in Blood Meridian: or, The Evening Redness in the West"; fall, 1998, "‘Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden's Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian"; spring, 2000, "Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and the Mythologizing of the American West"; spring, 2001, "Mexico and the Borderlands in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses"; summer, 2002, "In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy"; fall, 2003, "‘Everything a Hunter and Everything Hunted’: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian" and "The Flawed Design: American Imperialism in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian."

Daily Variety, October 30, 2006, review of The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form, p. 13; May 21, 2007, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 6; September 11, 2007, "Tomes Cue Quill Wins," p. 4.

Economist, July 30, 2005, "Not a Pretty Sight; New Fiction," p. 75; September 16, 2006, "Desert Storm; New Fiction," p. 93.

English Journal, November 1995, review of The Crossing, p. 99.

Entertainment Weekly, May 1, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 46; August 6, 1993, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 53; June 17, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 49; May 22, 1998, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 66; July 23, 1999, "Let's Go to the Audiotape: Listen Up! Stars of Stage, Screen, and TV Are Showing off Their Vocal Talents in Audiobooks," p. 60; May 27, 2005, "25 Hot Summer Titles," p. 103; July 22, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 82; September 29, 2006, "‘Road’ Warrior," p. 85; November 3, 2006, "The A List," p. 63; June 8, 2007, "Ghost Writer," p. 16; December 28, 2007, "A Second Opinion," p. 110.

Esquire, March 27, 1979, review of Suttree, p. 78; August, 2005, Tom Chiarella, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 46; September, 2006, "All the Pretty Horses Have Died: Cormac McCarthy's Journey through Postapocalyptic America," p. 94.

Explicator, summer, 1996, review of All the Pretty Horses; spring, 1998, review of The Crossing; fall, 1999, review of The Crossing; spring, 2001, "McCarthy's The Border Trilogy."

Financial Times, November 5, 2005, "Hostile Territory Cormac McCarthy's Fine New Thriller Explores the Moral Degradation of the American West," p. 32.

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, May, 2007, review of The Road, p. 54.

Forbes, March 14, 1994, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 50.

Guardian (Manchester, England), October 28, 2007, Michelle Pauli, "Cormac McCarthy Bestseller Wins James Tait Black."

Harper's Magazine, February, 2006, "Blood and Time: Cormac McCarthy and the Twilight of the West," p. 65.

Hollins Critic, April, 1981, "Further into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy," p. 1; October, 2007, review of The Road, p. 17.

Hollywood Reporter, December 7, 2004, "Rudin Corrals ‘Old Men’ Yarn for Paramount," p. 1; February 7, 2006, "‘No Country’ 'tis of Three: Coens, Jones," p. 65; November 1, 2006, review of The Sunset Limited, p. 11; May 21, 2007, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 27.

Houston Chronicle, April 6, 1997, "Texas Institute of Letters Honors McCarthy, Cambor," p. 22; May 24, 1998, "Border Lesson Unlearned; Cowboy Hero Courts Danger as McCarthy Ends Trilogy," p. 21; August 30, 1998, "Book Events," p. 22; August 15, 1999, "Creations of a Wordsmith," p. 1; May 15, 2005, "Two Men of Many Words; Much-Anticipated Works from Irving, McCarthy," p. 19; July 17, 2005, "On the Border of Evil; McCarthy's New Masterpiece Is a Blood-Drenched, Drug-Trade Morality Tale Set in West Texas," p. 17; September 24, 2006, "The Parable Lacks a Point; Cormac McCarthy Leads Readers through a ‘Godless’ Landscape," p. 22; March 31, 2007, "Oprah's Book Choice Is ‘The Road’ Less Traveled; Talk-Show Host's Selection Should Give Cormac McCarthy's Novel a Big Boost," p. 6.

Insight on the News, August 8, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 31.

Kansas City Star, August 31, 2005, "There Are New Thrills in No Country for Old Men."

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 500; July 1, 2005, "Anniversaries," p. 696; July 15, 2006, review of The Road, p. 694; May 1, 2007, "Cormac Does Oprah."

Kliatt, March, 2007, Avi Kramer, review of The Sunset Limited, p. 23; May, 2007, review of The Road, p. 53; July, 2007, review of The Road, p. 26.

Legal Intelligencer, July 22, 2005, "Too Good to Miss: The Legal Staff's Late-Summer Reading Picks."

Library Journal, May 15, 1998, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 115; June 15, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 59; September 1, 2006, review of The Road, p. 137; February 1, 2007, "Heard," p. 13; July 1, 2007, review of Blood Meridian, p. 130.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 17, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 3; June 12, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 3.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March, 2007, review of The Road, p. 43.

Miami Herald, October 1, 2006, "America, the Savage: Cormac McCarthy's 10th Novel Charts a Father's Struggle to Save His Son in a Barbaric Future."

Mississippi Quarterly, fall, 1993, "A ‘Bloody Dark Pastryman’: Cormac McCarthy's Recipe for Gunpowder and Historical Fiction in Blood Meridian"; winter, 2004, "McCarthy, Mac Airt and Mythology: Suttree and the Irish High King."

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

National Catholic Reporter, May 4, 2007, Tom Ryan, "Cormac McCarthy's Catholic Sensibilty," p. 13.

National Review, March 16, 1979, Guy Davenport, review of Suttree, p. 368; March 8, 1985, review of Blood Meridian, p. 44; October 12, 1998, Chilton Williamson, Jr., review of Cities of the Plain, p. 61.

New Criterion, October, 2006, "A Trackless Waste," p. 78.

New Leader, June 6, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 33; June 29, 1998, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 24; July 1, 2005, "A Prophet of Gore," p. 31.

New Republic, February 9, 1974, Doris Grumbach, review of Child of God, p. 26; March 10, 1979, review of Suttree, p. 46; May 6, 1985, review of Blood Meridian, p. 37; July 11, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 38.

New Statesman, May 2, 1980, review of Suttree, p. 682; November 14, 2005, "Bloody Trail," p. 54; December 4, 2006, "After the Apocalypse," p. 60.

New Statesman & Society, April 23, 1993, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 34; August 19, 1994, Nick Kinberley, review of The Crossing, p. 38.

Newsweek, January 7, 1974, review of Child of God, p. 63; May 18, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 68; June 13, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 54; May 18, 1998, "Writing into the Sunset," p. 75; December 25, 2000, "Let It Show, Let It Show: The Next Ballots to Be Counted Are for the Oscars. But First, Here Come the Holiday Movies," p. 74; July 25, 2005, "Guns, Money and Dope in the Texas Desert," p. 58; September 4, 2006, "Word Perfect: Books; the Coming Book Season Promises Hotly Anticipated Novels, Landmark Biographies—and Virgil's 2,000-Year-Old Man," p. 60; October 2, 2006, "On the Lost Highway; Cormac McCarthy Sends a Father and Son on the Scariest Road Trip He Can Imagine. Seat Belts Fastened?," p. 68.

New York, May 18, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 21; June 13, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 70.

New Yorker, August 26, 1974, Robert Coles, review of Child of God, p. 87; August 10, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 79; June 27, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 180; July 25, 2005, "Red Planet," p. 88.

New York Times, January 20, 1979, Anatole Broyard, review of Suttree, p. 19; May 27, 1992, Herbert Mitgang, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. B2; June 21, 1994, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Crossing, p. B2; May 22, 1998, "Books of the Times; Moving along the Border between Past and Future"; September 25, 2006, "The Road through Hell, Paved with Desperation," p. 1; July 14, 2007, "Two New McCarthy Novels on the Horizon," p. 8.

New York Times Book Review, September 29, 1968, review of Outer Dark, p. 4; February 18, 1979, review of Suttree, p. 14; September 23, 1984, Guy Davenport, review of Outer Dark, and Richard Brickner, review of Child of God, p. 46; April 28, 1985, Caryn James, review of Blood Meridian, p. 31; December 21, 1986, review of Suttree, p. 24; May 17, 1992, Madison Smartt Bell, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 9; May 31, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 23; August 30, 1992, review of Suttree, p. 24; June 12, 1994, Robert Hass, review of The Crossing, p. 1; July 24, 2005, "Texas Noir," p. 9; August 7, 2005, "TBR: Inside the List," p. 22; October 15, 2006, "TBR: Inside the List," p. 26.

New York Times Magazine, April 19, 1992, Richard B. Woodward, "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," p. 28.

O, the Oprah Magazine, January, 2006, "Books That Made a Difference to James Frey: The Oprah's Book Club Author Has a Soft Spot for Literary Bad Boys. But Where Would He Be without Lao-tzu?," p. 92; October, 2006, "When Only Love Is Left: Cormac McCarthy's Masterpiece: A Father, a Son, Love, and Desolation," p. 242.

People, July 13, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 27; June 13, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 31; June 1, 1998, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 41; August 8, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 46; November 19, 2007, "Movies," p. 37.

Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2007, "Slogging through Best-Sellerdom"; May 9, 2007, review of The Road.

Publishers Weekly, March 16, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 64; February 20, 1995, "The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians," p. 202; April 6, 1998, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 58; February 5, 2001, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 52; May 23, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 58; June 6, 2005, "Galley Talk," p. 13; May 29, 2006, "Strange Journey," p. 14; July 24, 2006, review of The Road, p. 32; December 4, 2006, review of The Road, p. 53; April 2, 2007, "Oprah Picks ‘The Road,’" p. 5; September 17, 2007, "McCarthy, Gore, Isaacson Win Quill Awards," p. 8.

Quadrant, November 2005, Jack Sexton, "The Natural Weight of Words," p. 86.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1998, Brian Evenson, review of Cities of the Plain, p. 250; fall, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men.

Sewanee Review, October 1985, review of Blood Meridian, p. 649.

Southern Literary Journal, spring, 1983, "The Ambiguous Nihilism of Cormac McCarthy"; spring, 1985, "Suttree and the Metaphysics of Death"; fall, 1991, "From Voyeurism to Archaeology: Cormac McCarthy's Child of God"; fall, 1991, "The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian"; fall, 1997, "The Kid's Fate, the Judge's Guilt: Ramifications of Closure in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian"; fall, 2004, "The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Early Novels and the Border Trilogy."

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, August 31, 2005, "No Country for Old Men: Beneath the Bleakness and Fine Writing Style Flutters a Heart of Simplistic Romanticism."

Spectator, May 24, 1980, Frank Rudman, review of Suttree; November 5, 2005, Robert Edric, "Pursuit in the Desert," p. 76; November 11, 2006, Sebastian Smee, "When All the Clocks Have Stopped."

Texas Monthly, July, 1998, Michael Hall, "Desperately Seeking Cormac," pp. 76-79; September, 2000, "Don Graham's Texas Classics," p. 28; July, 2005, review of No Country for Old Men, p. 64; August, 2005, "All the Pretty Corpses: Cormac McCarthy's Latest—Part Blood-Drenched Crime Spree, Part Dark Meditation on the State of the World—Grabs Hold of You and Won't Let Go," p. 78; October, 2006, "The Road," p. 60; January, 2007, Mike Shea, review of The Sunset Limited, p. 52.

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, summer, 2003, "Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian."

Time, January 4, 1993, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 64; June 6, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 62; May 18, 1998, R.Z. Sheppard, "Thar She Moos," p. 95; July 18, 2005, "Take the Money and Run: Cormac McCarthy's Latest Is a Tale of a Man with a Fortune in Found Cash and a Hellhound on His Heels," p. 73; October 9, 2006, "Writers on the Storm," p. 68; October 23, 2006, "Postapocalypse Now," p. 94; October 18, 2007, Lev Grossman, "A Conversation Between Author Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, About the New Movie No Country for Old Men."

Times Literary Supplement, May 2, 1980, review of Suttree, p. 500; April 21, 1989, review of Blood Meridian, p. 436.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), May 10, 1992, Bruce Allen, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 5; June 26, 1994, review of The Stonemason, p. 5.

USA Today, July 26, 2005, "‘No Country’: The Old West with Contemporary Brutality," p. 5; September 28, 2006, "All the Unpretty Forces Unleashed in ‘Road,’" p. 1; March 29, 2007, "Book Buzz," p. 4; April 5, 2007, "Book Buzz," p. 6.

U.S. News & World Report, June 6, 2005, "Reading Tryst," p. 2.

Vanity Fair, August, 2005, "Cormac Country; Cormac McCarthy Would Rather Hang out with Physicists than Other Writers," p. 98.

Variety, November 6, 2006, review of The Sunset Limited, p. 37; October 22, 2007, "H'W'D Ponies up with McCarthy," p. 8.

Village Voice, July 15, 1986, review of Blood Meridian, p. 48; May 19, 1992, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 70.

Vogue, August, 2005, Taylor Antrim, "Hot Pursuit; in Cormac McCarthy's Riveting New Novel, a Modern Cowboy Goes on the Run," p. 164.

Washington Post, November 19, 1992, David Streitfeld, "Fiction Prize to "Pretty Horses' (Cormac McCarthy and Paul Monette win National Book Award)," p. D1.

Washington Post Book World, January 13, 1974, review of Child of God, p. 1; May 3, 1992, Kurt Tidmore, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 46; June 28, 1992, review of Blood Meridian, p. 12; June 5, 1994, review of The Crossing, p. 1.

Weekly Standard, August 29, 2005, "Tale of the New West: Kicking the Corpses of Postmodern America," p. 44; February 5, 2007, "Life after Death; Cormac McCarthy's Post-Apocalypse Western."

World & I, September, 1992, Bruce Allen, review of All the Pretty Horses, p. 373; 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.