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Cormac McCarthy

Biography

Cormac McCarthy

Born in Rhode Island in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was originally named Charles (after his father), but changed his name to Cormac after the Irish King. Raised Roman Catholic, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1951 where he concentrated in Liberal Arts. He left school in 1953 to join the Air Force, returned in 1957, and left again in 1960 without having earned a degree. During this time he married Lee Holleman, a fellow student, and they had a son, Cullen.

In 1965 he published his first novel, THE ORCHARD KEEPER (his editor at Random House was Faulkner's long time editor, Albert Erskine). In 1966 he married Anne DeLisle, a young English singer/dancer. BLOOD MERIDIAN was published in 1985, and while it received little critical attention it is now widely regarded as McCarthy's finest work. The first volume of the Border Trilogy, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, was published in 1992, followed by THE CROSSING and CITIES OF THE PLAIN.

Cormac McCarthy

Books by Cormac McCarthy

The Counselor
by Cormac McCarthy - Fiction, Screenplay
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy - Fiction, Literary Fiction

Cormac McCarthy, winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, returns with his 10th novel, a terrifying "what if" story about the apocalypse. A father and his son travel the road in search of food, safety and humanity after a nuclear war has wiped out society and most of the human race.

No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy - Fiction
Cities of the Plain
by Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy - Fiction

At once a Western, a picaresque adventure, and a coming-of-age novel, suspenseful, wryly funny, and elegiac, All the Pretty Horses is the story of John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of west Texas ranchers. Upon his grandfather's death and his parents' divorce, the sixteen-year-old Cole finds himself landless, penniless, and possessed of skills that mean nothing in a country transformed by highways and a world war, where cowboys are as doomed and marginal as the Indians they once displaced. With his friend Lacey Rawlins, John Grady sets off for Mexico. They have no idea what they will find there: on their map, the area south of the Rio Grande is blank. They have between them two horses, a rifle, and their bedrolls. The year is 1949.

Child of God
by Cormac McCarthy - Fiction, Noir

In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail.  While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.