Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy (born July 20, 1933, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.—died June 13, 2023, Santa Fe, New Mexico) was an American writer in the Southern gothic tradition whose novels, about wayward characters in the rural American South and Southwest, are noted for their dark violence, dense prose, and stylistic complexity. McCarthy achieved public fame late in his career with the publication of The Border Trilogy (1992–98), in which he rewrote and challenged myths of the American West. With his gift for metaphor and his unerring ear for local dialect, he was often compared to classic authors of the American canon, such as William Faulkner and Herman Melville.

Early life

When McCarthy was four years old, his father joined the legal staff of the Tennessee Valley Authority and moved the family of six children from Providence, Rhode Island, to Knoxville, Tennessee. Raised in an affluent home, McCarthy rejected his parents’ expectations of him. In 1992 he told The New York Times, “I was not what they had in mind. I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen.” After graduating from the local Roman Catholic high school, McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1953 to 1956. He resumed his studies the following year. His fiction, first published in the university’s literary magazine under the name C.J. McCarthy (in one instance, including “Jr.”), began to attract critical attention, and he won an Ingram Merrill award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960.

The Orchard Keeper

McCarthy left college, without finishing his degree, to pursue a writing career. He moved to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel, but several years later he moved back to Tennessee, the setting for his first four books. McCarthy’s debut novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), is about a young boy and his two mentors. The novel is marked by qualities that would be amplified in McCarthy’s later work—an unyielding realism, a poetic prose style that elevated the commonplace to a symbolic significance, and rich descriptions of the natural world. It won the 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel, although McCarthy’s clear admiration for Faulkner’s style was negatively received by some critics. In The New York Times Orville Prescott wrote that McCarthy tells his story “with so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”

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A wandering writer’s life

In 1965 McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He toured Europe before settling on Ibiza, an island off the coast of Spain, where he finished writing his second novel before returning to Tennessee in 1967: Outer Dark (1968), is a story about two incestuous siblings. Social outcasts were also the focus of his two subsequent novels, Child of God (1974), about a lonely man’s descent into depravity, and Suttree (1979), about a man who ekes out a living from a river in Knoxville that symbolizes the elemental forces of life, nature, and death. The latter novel is regarded as McCarthy’s most autobiographical work: its protagonist scorns a comfortable middle-class lifestyle to live among society’s rejects.

Indeed, by the time Suttree was published McCarthy had been leading a peripatetic life of self-imposed poverty. He refused to supplement his writer’s income with jobs such as teaching or lecturing, and he eschewed most self-promotion of his books, granting very few interviews. His second wife, Annie DeLisle, once recalled to The New York Times that the couple had resorted to bathing in a lake near Knoxville, such was their poverty during their marriage.

McCarthy’s early novels established him in literary circles as a regional writer of the Appalachian South, although his books sold poorly. (Until The Border Trilogy, none of his works sold more than 5,000 copies.) Among his first significant champions was novelist Saul Bellow, who was part of a panel of judges that awarded McCarthy a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1981. McCarthy lived on the proceeds while researching and writing his next novel, a book that would mark a shift in his focus from the rural South to the Southwest. (He had moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1976).

Blood Meridian

McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), a violent frontier tale loosely based on historical events, was a critical sensation, hailed as his masterpiece. Exhibiting no sentimentality and no moral judgment of its characters or events, it tells the story of a 14-year-old boy who joins a gang of lawless scalp hunters committing senseless acts of violence along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1840s. The group is headed by a malevolent figure called “the judge,” who leads the gang through a series of staggeringly amoral actions, through which McCarthy explores the nature of good and evil:

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The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

Critic Harold Bloom likened McCarthy’s literary powers in Blood Meridian to those of Shakespeare as well as Faulkner and Melville, and he called the book “the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.” It has appeared on many lists of greatest American novels. In its first printing, however, it sold fewer than 1,500 copies.

The Border Trilogy

McCarthy achieved popular fame with All the Pretty Horses (1992), winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The best-selling novel is the first volume of The Border Trilogy, in which the border between Mexico and the United States serves as a metaphor for the borderland between progress and dehumanization and between history and myth. Influenced in style more by Ernest Hemingway than by Faulkner, All the Pretty Horses is the coming-of-age story of John Grady Cole, a Texan who travels to Mexico. The second installment, The Crossing (1994), set before and during World War II, follows the picaresque adventures of brothers Billy and Boyd Parham and centers on three round-trip passages that Billy makes between southwestern New Mexico and Mexico. The trilogy concludes with Cities of the Plain (1998), which interweaves the lives of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham through their employment on a ranch in New Mexico.

Violent themes

Before the release of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy changed publishers and secured the services of an agent. In addition, he granted a rare interview to The New York Times, in which he addressed the grisly scenes of violence and unrelenting bleakness in his novels:

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. 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.

No Country for Old Men and The Road

After The Border Trilogy, McCarthy published No Country for Old Men (2005), a bloody modern western that opens with a drug deal gone bad. In the postapocalyptic The Road (2006), a father and son struggle to survive after a disaster (left unspecified) that has all but destroyed the United States. Critics marked a new emotional depth and a note of redemption in the book, much unlike McCarthy’s previous work; yet, as The Guardian’s Eric Homberger wrote in 2023, “The stronger note is a sense of the inevitability of death, of a father’s bitter knowledge that he will leave his young son to make his own way in the blasted world.” McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for The Road.

Women and masculinity in McCarthy’s novels

In 2007 McCarthy consented to an interview with Oprah Winfrey, who had selected The Road for her popular book club. Among the topics she broached was the “masculine” themes of his writing and the scant number of female characters. He told Winfrey, “Women are tough.…I don’t pretend to understand women.” He also said that he still found women to be “mysterious,” even after having been married three times. The absence of women and portrayals of toxic masculinity have remained common criticisms of McCarthy’s books.

Final novels

McCarthy’s next novel, The Passenger, was not released until 2022. It centers on a salvage diver who struggles with the decades-old suicide of his sister as he becomes increasingly paranoid after working on a mysterious plane crash. The companion work, Stella Maris, was published later that year; its protagonist is the sister of The Passenger’s salvage diver, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago who has admitted herself into a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin.

Film adaptations and other projects

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McCarthy also wrote the plays The Stonemason (2001) and The Sunset Limited (2006; television movie 2011) and the screenplay for The Counselor (2013), a drama about drug trafficking. A number of his novels were adapted for film, some with more success than others. All the Pretty Horses (2000), directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, received mostly lackluster reviews. The Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men, starring Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, and Josh Brolin, won Academy Awards for best picture and adapted screenplay, among other accolades. In 2009 John Hillcoat directed Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron in the critically acclaimed The Road, and Child of God was made into a film directed by James Franco in 2013. Before his death in 2023 McCarthy was working on the screenplay adaptation of Blood Meridian.

Personal life

McCarthy remained intensely private to the end of his life. In 2008, however, he sold his archives to Texas State University for $2 million. Portions of the archives first went on display at the university in 2009. The school acquired additional materials, including McCarthy’s personal journals and photographs, in 2024 and planned to make the full archives available to scholars in 2025.

McCarthy was married three times—to Lee Holleman (1961–62), Annie DeLisle (1966–78), and Jennifer Winkley (1998–2006)—and had two sons. In November 2024 Vanity Fair published a profile of Augusta Britt, a woman who had met McCarthy in a motel in Tucson, Arizona, in 1976 when she was a 16-year-old runaway escaping an abusive background and McCarthy was 42 and still married to DeLisle. The following year McCarthy traveled to Mexico with her, and they began a sexual relationship that lasted until 1981. According to Britt, McCarthy’s editor was questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and McCarthy became wanted in Arizona for statutory rape and violation of the Mann Act, a law that forbade transport of women and girls across state and federal borders for “immoral purpose.”

McCarthy and Britt maintained a close friendship to the end of his life, and to Vanity Fair she described her experience with him in positive terms. Yet, the revelation ignited heated discussions among fans who believed McCarthy’s actions to be unconscionable and took issue with the article’s tone.

In addition, Britt told the magazine that she had been the model for many of his characters and had inspired certain details in his novels. For example, she claimed that the name John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses originated as the name she gave to a plush toy kitten, and that the novel’s title was taken from a lullaby she would sing to the kitten at night. Many scholars were skeptical of these claims, noting that some of these characters originated in drafts that McCarthy began working on before their meeting.