Cormac McCarthy

[1933 – ]

American Novelist

 

Page created by

Jolly Sharp.

 

Brief Biography

WWW Links:

Cormac McCarthy Homepage

McCarthy Bibliography

 

Major Works:

The Orchard Keeper (1965)

Outer Dark (1968)

Child of God (1974)

Suttree (1979)

Blood Meridian (1985)

All the Pretty Horses (1992)

The Crossing (1994)

Cities of the Plain (1998)

Brief Biography. Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 30, 1933, but he and his parents moved to Knoxville, Tennessee when Cormac was only four. After graduating from a Knoxville Catholic high school, McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee during the 1951-52 academic year before leaving to roam the country and finally to join the Air Force. In 1957, McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee. However, after receiving a creative writing award in 1960, he decided to devote full-time to his writing, leaving without his degree.

McCarthy’s first novels focused on Southern protagonists who grapple with the brutality of society and the world in general. His later novels move the setting to the West, yet the historical and lonely landscapes seem to intensify the violence and horror encountered by the characters. Therefore, his novels contain graphic slaughters, sexual violence, isolation, homelessness, death, destruction, barren landscapes, grotesque images, and passionate cruelty. His books usually express these themes as a part of life and often depict characters that seem to have no understandable motivation for their actions, creating an almost supernatural aura around them.

McCarthy is often compared to William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, especially for his Southern novels [The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree] and to Larry McMurtry for his Western novels [Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain]. He has also written one play, The Stonemason (1944), and one screenplay, The Gardener’s Son (1996). McCarthy’s own personal alienation from the lime-light of the media and his emphasis on regional writings affected his range of readers. However, in 2000, All the Pretty Horses was made into a movie, allowing publicity for his work.

McCarthy’s command of language combined with his Gothic images and violent themes establish him as a writer of the grotesque. One excerpt from Blood Meridian offers a vivid example of all three techniques:

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses’ hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling our in Spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton’s warhorse. (156)