Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy: Biography

As one of America's most critically acclaimed authors, Cormac McCarthy has been writing steadily since the 1960s. Notoriously private and fame adverse, McCarthy has crafted his own unique writing style and prefers to let his writing speak for itself. Here's a look at his life and career.

Early life and education

Cormac McCarthy was born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933, in Rhode Island. The family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937, where Cormac's father worked as a lawyer. Raised Catholic, McCarthy attended a parochial school where he felt bored and uninterested in his studies. After graduating high school, McCarthy enrolled at the University of Tennessee to study liberal arts in 1951. He dropped out in 1953 to enlist in the U.S Air Force. During four years of service, McCarthy spent his spare time reading and, for the first time, began to understand and enjoy literature.

Returning to the University of Tennessee in 1957, McCarthy began to write. He produced two early short stories, "Wake for Susan" (1959) and "A Drowning Incident" (1960). Each story earned him the Ingram-Merill Award for creative writing, and McCarthy began to take his calling seriously, changing his first name from Charles to the Irish version, Cormac. McCarthy dropped out of university again in 1959 and moved briefly to Chicago before settling in an isolated shack in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.

Early Works

McCarthy lived without heat or running water in this remote setting while writing his first book, The Orchard Keeper (1965). Set in rural Tennesse between WWI and WWII, the novel tells the intertwining stories of three men as they struggle to maintain control in a lawless community. The book introduced readers to themes and imagery that would reoccur throughout McCarthy's works. Drawing heavily on biblical illusions, McCarthy depicted characters outside society as they struggled with moral and ethical challenges. The Orchard Keeper was successful with readers and critics, drawing comparisons to the literary giant William Faulkner (1897-1962).

Several award committees recognized McCarthy's promise and emerging talent. In 1965 he received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1966, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. He used the funds to travel around Southern Europe and settled briefly in an artist's colony on the island of Ibiza off the Spanish coast, where he worked on his next novel, Outer Dark (1968).

Set in Appalachia around the turn of the 20th century, Outer Dark tells the story of an incestuous relationship between Culla Holme and his sister, Rinthy. After Rinthy gives birth to a child, the pair are forced to flee the community in shame and set off on separate odysseys.

Critical success

In 1969, McCarthy obtained the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing and used the money to purchase a large, dilapidated dairy barn in rural Tennessee. Over the next few years, McCarthy singlehandedly restored the giant structure, learning stonework, and carpentry skills. Despite his early works' success and critical acclaim, McCarthy completely rejected any fame and fortune. He continually turned down lucrative speaking engagements and high-profile interviews, opting to live in conditions of extreme poverty. His wife at the time reported their financial situation was so dire that they would often bathe in the local lake.

This extreme poverty and isolation inspired his next novel, Child of God (1973). The story of Lester Ballard, a man cut off from society and community, this dark work follows Ballard's increasingly demented and depraved behavior, which eventually culminates in a series of gruesome murders. McCarthy claims to have based the story on actual historical events in Sevier County, Tennessee.

McCarthy's fourth novel, Suttree, was published in 1979. Written over 20 years, this semi-autobiographical novel explored McCarthy's own experiences of hard drinking and isolation through the character Cornelius "Bud" Suttree. A loosely connected series of passages follows Suttree's existence on the edge of society as he struggles to understand the world around him. Suttree is considered McCarthy's most comical work.

In 1981, at Saul Bellow's suggestion, the MacArthur Fellowship awarded McCarthy the genius grant.

McCarthy used the grant to travel through the American Southwest, conducting historical research for his next book. He became heavily immersed in the region's culture on his travels and even learned to speak Spanish. This intensive research helped McCarthy produce his most famous work, Blood Meridian (1985). A violent and philosophical Western, the novel follows "the kid" as he joins the Glanton Gang on a reign of terror through the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Though Blood Meridian did not receive much critical acclaim or attention upon release, it has since become widely recognized as a masterpiece and is considered McCarthy's finest work.

Mainstream success

While McCarthy enjoyed a great deal of critical acclaim, his novels were not widely read and he remained a cult figure. His first taste of mainstream success came with All the Pretty Horses (1992). The novel tells the story of John Grady, a young man seeking adventures in the life of a cowboy. The book earned McCarthy the National Book Award and was a mainstream hit. As the first entry of The Border Trilogy, McCarthy soon followed up with The Crossing (1994) and Cities on the Plain (1998).

His next novel, No Country for Old Men (2005), is a modern western about a man getting caught up in a drug deal gone wrong. The book was adapted into an Oscar-winning film in 2007. The reclusive McCarthy became a well-known public figure and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for The Road (2006). This post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son's journey across America became one of his most widely read works.

In 2014, McCarthy became the first trustee from a non-science background at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. This multidisciplinary institution focuses on social sciences and solving critical social questions. As a trustee, McCarthy produced his first piece of nonfiction writing, "The Kekule Problem" (2017). The essay explored the origins of language and the development of the unconscious mind. Today, McCarthy lives in New Mexico and continues to write.

Cormac McCarthy: Books

Cormac Mccarthy has published ten novels, two plays, two screenplays, and one essay. Here's a look at some of his most famous works:

Suttree (1979)

Considered McCarthy's most comic novel, Suttree follows the sporadic experiences of Cornelius "Bud" Suttree. Once a successful man from a privileged family, Suttree has rejected his background to live on the fringes of society, surrounded by drunks, criminals, and prostitutes. Battling depression and alcohol addiction, he survives by occasionally catching fish. Suttree stumbles from one situation to the next while encountering a cast of bizarre characters throughout a rapidly industrializing Tennessee.

Suttree is McCarthy's most personal work, drawing from his many years of living remotely in rural Tennessee. McCarthy turned his back on fame and fortune to survive in the same hand-to-mouth fashion as the novel's protagonist during this period. Like McCarthy, Suttree is a detached outsider, observing and trying to understand the rapid changes in the world around him.

Blood Meridian (1985)

McCarthy's most famous and well-regarded novel is an apocalyptic western set in the American Southwest during the 1840s. The protagonist, known only as "the kid," runs away from his family to join a band of bloodthirsty bandits called the Glanton Gang. Glanton's second in command is a giant menacing man known as the Judge. The giant is a brilliant and deadly figure, and he seems to have a supernatural presence as he manipulates the men and environment around him.

Fig. 2 - Blood Meridian's graphic depiction of violence questioned the romanticized ethos of the American West.

Blood Meridian contains violent depictions of life in the American West, which shatters the notion of upstanding cowboys fighting for justice. McCarthy's exhaustive research into the period helped produce a historically accurate piece on the nature of violence and morality. Although it made little impact upon release, Blood Meridian is now considered by some to be the Great American Novel.

The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities on the Plain (1998)

The Border Trilogy consists of three novels based on the Mexico–United States border from the 1930s to the 1950s. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady sets off with a friend to seek the adventurous life of a cowboy. They find work on a Mexican ranch but are implicated in a crime and struggle to survive in a Mexican prison. The Crossing follows two young brothers, Billy and Boyd Purham, seeking revenge for their parent's murder and facing the harsh realities of nature in the border region. The final entry, Cities of the Plain, unites John Grady and Billy Purham as they develop a close fraternal bond and seek out a new, fulfilling life.

McCarthy used the Border Trilogy to present the coming of age stories of the two main protagonists as they struggle against fear, nature, and evil in the harsh terrain of the borderlands. The books saw McCarthy's first breakthrough to mainstream success.

The Road (2006)

The Road is a bleak, post-apocalyptic novel that earned McCarthy a Pulitzer Prize. The story follows a father and son as they walk across an ash-strewn American landscape. Most of the population has been wiped out by some unnamed disaster, and society has collapsed, with gangs of survivors roaming the barren landscape to enslave or eat other people.

As the father tries to teach his son how to survive despite the hopeless state of the world, they journey south towards the coast. McCarthy depicts brutal and nightmarish scenes of people forced to do anything they can to survive as the father grows sicker, he struggles with his own belief in God. This harrowing and tragic novel is one of McCarthy's darkest works.

Cormac McCarthy: Writing style

Cormac McCarthy's novels often defy simple genre definitions. He is often considered part of the Southern Gothic tradition, along with legendary American writers like Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) and William Faulkner.

McCarthy's writing is often noted for his unique style and diction. He uses punctuation sparsely and never uses semicolons, arguing that quotation marks and commas are untidy and distracting for the reader. In the place of a comma, McCarthy uses the conjunction "and", resulting in long, repetitive sentences. Even though character dialogue is not marked out with quotation marks, he avoids signal phrases to indict which character is speaking.

While other authors use long, descriptive passages to create atmosphere or build scenes, McCarthy often uses direct and declarative statements. His diction often includes colloquialisms and historically accurate words and phrases that have fallen out of use. By using outdated words and forms, McCarthy can anchor his work in the desired time and place to create a sense of realism. Many of his works based in the borderlands contain large sections of untranslated Spanish dialogue.

McCarthy's works deal with dark elements of human nature and often contain a great deal of violence. As with many writers from the Southern Gothic tradition, McCarthy uses many biblical illusions throughout his works and uses his characters to consider religious concepts. Though McCarthy's work has a great deal of pessimism and even nihilism, there are moments of humor and even hope in his later novels.

Cormac McCarthy: Facts

Considered one of America's most important living writers, Cormac McCarthy is a notably private person who avoids fame and exposure. Little is known about many aspects of his life, but here are a few facts about the author.

• His favorite novel is Herman Melville's (1891-1891) Moby-Dick (1851).

• Because he avoids fame, he didn't have a literary agent for most of his career.

• Although his first book was published in 1965, McCarthy did not give a single televised interview until 2007.

• Mccarthy writes all of his novels on a mechanical typewriter.

Fig. 3 - Many of McCarthy's most famous works were written on a typewriter he bought in a pawn shop for $50 in 1963.

Cormac McCarthy: Quotes

Know for his direct and immersive prose, Cormac McCarthy is one of the most distinctive writers of the modern age.

McCarthy's works are full of philosophical characters contemplating the deeper meaning of concepts like love, God, and war. In this example, the Judge embodies the drive for violence and views war as a key tenet of human nature. In all of McCarthy's works, violence plays a central role as the author explores the darker side of human nature.

Morality and the struggle between good and evil play a significant role in McCarthy's work. Characters in challenging situations face difficult choices and are forced to measure their moral standing. Though the protagonists are often conflicted, McCarthy is skilled at creating memorable and almost supernatural villains, like Anton Chigurh and the Judge.