Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy,[1] July 20th, 1933 in Providence, Rhode
Island, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American
novelist who has authored ten novels in the Southern
Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He has also written plays and screenplays.
Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William
Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville.
Biography
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode
Island on July 20, 1933 and moved with his family to
Knoxville, Tennessee in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters
and two brothers. In Knoxville he attended Knoxville Catholic High
School. His father was a successful lawyer for the Tennessee Valley
Authority from 1934 to 1967.
McCarthy entered the University of Tennessee in 1951-1952 and was a liberal
arts major. In 1953 he joined the United States Air Force for four years, two of
which he spent in Alaska where he hosted a radio show. In 1957 he returned to the University of Tennessee. During this time in
college he published two stories in a student paper and won the Ingram-Merrill award in 1959 and 1960. In 1961 he and fellow
university student Lee Holleman were married and had their son Cullen. He left school without earning a degree and moved with his
family to Chicago where he wrote his first novel. He returned to
Sevier County, Tennessee, and his marriage to Lee Holleman ended.[2]
McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by
Random House in 1965. He decided to send the manuscript to Random House because "it was the
only publisher I had heard of." At Random House the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the
next 20 years.
In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The
American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania, hoping to visit
Ireland. While on the ship, he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. In
1966 they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel
Outer Dark. Afterward he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was
published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.[2]
In 1969, McCarthy and his wife moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a
barn, which McCarthy renovated, even doing the stonework himself.[2] Here he wrote his next book Child of God, based on
actual events. Child of God was published in 1973. Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in
southern Appalachia. In 1976 McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to
El Paso, Texas. In 1979 his novel Suttree was
finally published. He had been writing Suttree on and off for twenty years.[3] Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship he wrote his next novel Blood
Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which was published in 1985.
McCarthy lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico, area, north of Santa Fe, with his wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy closely and
rarely gives interviews. In one of his few interviews (with The New York
Times) McCarthy is described as a "gregarious loner" and reveals that he is not a fan of authors that do not "deal
with issues of life and death" citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of
writers who are considered good I consider strange."[3]. McCarthy remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at
the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann.
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novel, The Road, as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club.[1] In addition, McCarthy agreed to sit
down for his first ever television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey
Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the
library of the Santa Fe Institute; McCarthy told Oprah that he does not know any writers and much prefers the company of
scientists. During the interview he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he has endured at times
during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a young child at an advanced age, and how his now
eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road.
Family
Children:
- Cullen McCarthy, son (with Lee Holleman)
- John McCarthy, son (with Jennifer Winkley)
Marriages:
- Lee Holleman, (1961) divorced
- Annie DeLisle, (1967 - divorced 1981)
- Jennifer Winkley (Married as of 2006)
Awards
- In college, McCarthy won the Ingram-Merrill award in 1959 and 1960.
- The Orchard Keeper was awarded the Faulkner prize for a first novel.[3]
Works
Blood Meridian
This 1985 novel of historical fiction marked a shift in the setting of his books to the southwest. His works are often divided
into the "Appalachian Period" and the "Southwestern Period". This work is polarizing: it is certainly his most violent work, but
it's also a work of tremendous depth and precision. It traces the life of a boy named only "the kid", who in 1851 finds himself
riding with "The Glanton Gang", a vicious gang of outlaws who are being paid by the
Mexican government to bring back Indian scalps. The book unflinchingly depicts
horrific acts of violence committed by Americans, Indians and Mexicans alike. Despite the
graphic depictions of violence the outlaws commit against nearly anyone they encounter in their journey across a long swath of
the West, the novel is written in a language that is not only exact but florid and dense, using a vocabulary heavily borrowed
from Spanish and a diction that seems at turns archaic and lyrical. In a 2006 New York Times poll asking many noted
writers and critics what they thought were the most important works in American fiction in the last 25 years, Blood
Meridian ranked #3 (behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld).[1]
The Border Trilogy
Despite several awards and a number of positive reviews, McCarthy was not widely read until the publication of his sixth
novel, All the Pretty Horses (1992). The book, the first part of what
McCarthy calls The Border Trilogy, spent some time on bestseller lists and won the National Book Award and National Book Critics
Circle Award. It was later made into a film. The Crossing (1994) and
Cities of the Plain (1998) round out the trilogy. In the 2006 New York
Times poll mentioned above in the Blood Meridian section, The Border Trilogy also received multiple votes as
the most important work of American fiction in the last 25 years.[2]
Works
Derivative productions
The Gardener's Son was part of a series for PBS and aired in January 1977. In 2000, McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses was made into a film directed by Billy Bob Thornton. McCarthy's
2005 novel No Country for Old Men has been adapted into a 2007
film directed by the Coen Brothers
and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, and
Javier Bardem.
Criticism
B. R. Myers listed McCarthy as one of "America's pretentious authors" in his
article "A Reader's Manifesto", published in the Atlantic Monthly, August 2001.
Notes
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
