CORMAC MCCARTHY

'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.

Contents

Biography

Family

Awards

Works

''Blood Meridian''

The Border Trilogy

Works

Derivative productions

Criticism

Notes

External links

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.
In 1969, McCarthy and his wife moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a barn, which McCarthy renovated, even doing the stonework himself. 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. 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 and is considered to be his best work.
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.". 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. 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]

★ He won a Traveling Fellowship award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

★ In 1969 McCarthy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing.

★ In 1981 McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

★ In 1992 McCarthy was awarded the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for "All The Pretty Horses."

★ In 2007 McCarthy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "The Road."

★ In 2007, McCarthy was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction, one of Britain's oldest literary honors.

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

★ ''The Orchard Keeper'' (1965) ISBN 978-0330314916

★ ''Outer Dark'' (1968) ISBN 0679728732

★ ''Child of God'' (1974) ISBN 0-394-48771-0

★ ''The Gardener's Son'' (1976) ISBN 0-88001-481-4

★ ''Suttree'' (1979) ISBN 0-394-48213-1

★ ''Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West'' (1985) ISBN 0-394-40027-5

★ ''All the Pretty Horses'' (1992) ISBN 0394574745

★ ''The Crossing'' (1994) ISBN 0-394-57475-3

★ ''The Stonemason'' () ISBN 978-0-330-35033-4

★ ''Cities of the Plain'' (1998) ISBN 0679423907

★ ''No Country for Old Men'' (2005) ISBN 0-375-40677-8

★ ''The Road'' (September 26, 2006) ISBN 978-0-367-26543-2

★ ''The Sunset Limited'' () ISBN 0307278360

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

1.
Oprah's selection a real shocker: Winfrey, McCarthy strange bookfellows
2. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, , Edwin, Arnold, University Press of Mississippi, , ISBN 1-57806-105-9
3. Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction Richard Woodward

External links

★ The Cormac McCarthy Society

★ "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" - 1992 interview with McCarthy from the ''New York Times''.

★ About No Country for Old Men (French)

★ Cormac McCarthy: No Place for Old Copy-editors

★ 1995 Essay

★ Cormac McCarthy Concordances and Vocabulary Studies - From John Sepich - Author of ''Notes on Blood Meridian''