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English Literature Author: Cormac McCarthy
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by Christopher Metress
Samford University
Birmingham, Alabama
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More About Cormac McCarthy...
Cormac McCarthy
1933-
American
Introduction
Major Works
Chronology
Introduction
In 1988, Vereen Bell called Cormac McCarthy America's "best unknown major writer." Two years later, another critic agreed, speculating that McCarthy "may be the most highly respected unknown writer in contemporary letters." Within a few years, however, all this changed. Whereas McCarthy's first five novels sold an estimated 15,000 copies, his next three novels reached the New York Times bestseller list. If McCarthy started the 1990s in relative obscurity, he ended the decade as perhaps America's best-known formerly unknown writer.
McCarthy's career is generally divided into two phases: the "southern novels" (ending with Suttree in 1979) and the "western novels" (beginning with Blood Meridian in 1985). While there are marked differences in tone and emphasis between these two periods -- especially if we remove Blood Meridian from the western novels and let The Border Trilogy stand alone -- common concerns unite them. The southern novels and Blood Meridian are certainly darker and more nihilistic than The Border Trilogy, but all of McCarthy's work is concerned with protagonists who have been dispossessed of their heritage and restlessly seek some action or code that will give their existence meaning. Often, that dispossession comes at the hands of external forces (the murder of John Wesley Rattner's father in The Orchard Keeper or the sale of John Grady Cole's family ranch in All the Pretty Horses); at other times, however, the dispossession is self-inflicted (Culla Holmes's refusal to recognize his son/brother in Outer Dark or Cornelius Suttree's desire to extricate himself from social commitments in Suttree). Either way, these dispossessions leave McCarthy's "heroes" (always a contested term in his fiction) confronted by a paralyzing nothingness, and in response to this they seek to establish some foundation for action and belief. Without such a foundation, all action would become meaningless and all belief unnecessary, and McCarthy's protagonists resist such emptiness. Whether his heroes ever find a foundation for meaning sufficient enough to give purpose to their actions -- or whether they simply discover that no foundation is possible, and thus embrace that as their guiding principle -- remains a point of contention among McCarthy's most careful readers.
The Border Trilogy presents a great challenge to understanding McCarthy's career. Some critics see the trilogy as a betrayal of McCarthy's true vision, which is best expressed in the dark and purposeless violence of Blood Meridian. In this novel, it is the demonic Judge Holden who supposedly speaks for McCarthy when he proclaims, "You want to be told there is some mystery. The mystery is there is no mystery." With All the Pretty Horses -- so these critics contend -- McCarthy turned his back on Judge Holden's brutal but honest vision of nothingness and embraced instead a soft sentimentality that goes down better with readers and sells more books. In contrast, other critics see the trilogy as a mature extension of McCarthy's earlier concerns. These three novels may indeed be more affirmative than the early works, but McCarthy is still exploring the means by which his protagonists seek to give meaning to their existence. Instead of embracing soft sentimentality, the trilogy strips away the false myths and romantic delusions that have come to surround what are, in the end, honorable codes of conduct and moral guides for purposeful action.
Whether McCarthy's next novel will take his career into a third phase, or whether he will continue to explore the richness of the American West, we do not know. We do, however, know this: whatever direction he takes, he will not go unnoticed. McCarthy may continue to live in relative obscurity, but his novels no longer do.
Major Works
- The Orchard Keeper (1965)
- Outer Dark (1968)
- Child of God (1974)
- Suttree (1979)
- Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
- All the Pretty Horses (1992)
- The Crossing (1994)
- Cities of the Plain (1998)
- The Border Trilogy (compilation of previous three novels, 1999)
Chronology
1933
Born Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., July 20, Providence, Rhode Island.
1937
Family moves to Knoxville, Tennessee.
1951-52
Attends the University of Tennessee.
1953-57
Serves in the United States Air Force.
1957-60
Returns to the University of Tennessee. Leaves without a degree.
1965
The Orchard Keeper wins William Faulkner Foundation Award (now PEN-Faulkner Award) for best first novel by an American.
1966
Awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Grant.
1968
Publishes Outer Dark.
1969
Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing.
1974
Publishes Child of God.
1976
Writes The Gardener's Son, a screenplay, for PBS's Visions series.
1979
Publishes Suttree, his most autobiographical novel.
1981
Receives a "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation. With money from the award ($236,000), moves to El Paso and buys a home.
1985
Publishes first "Western" novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West. Novel sells only 1,500 copies.
1992
Publishes first bestseller, All the Pretty Horses, which wins both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
1994
Publishes both The Crossing and The Stonemason (a play).
1998
Publishes The Cities of the Plain.
Christopher Metress is associate professor of English at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. His essays on American and English literature have appeared in numerous journals, and his most recent book, The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, was published in 2002 by the University of Virginia Press.
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