A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Born in Providence, Rhode Island the 20th of July in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was originally named Charles (after his father), but changed his name to Cormac after the Irish King. He is the third of six children (the eldest son) born to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy (he has two brothers and three sisters). McCarthy 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. Although he won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1981, until the 1990s he was known only to a small coterie of devoted readers. 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. In finely wrought, acutely observant prose, McCarthy typically portrays a sleazy American South and Southwest filled with appalling poverty, violence, and cruelty. He moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. In Knoxville he attended Knoxville Catholic High School. His father was a successful lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1967. In 1967, the McCarthys moved from Knoxville to Washington, D.C., where Charles was the principal attorney in a law firm until his retirement. He left school in 1953 to join the Air Force, returned in 1957 where he published two stories, "A Drowning Incident" and "Wake for Susan" in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, calling himself C. J. McCarthy, Jr., and left again in 1960 without having earned a degree. While at the university, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. During this time he married Lee Holleman, a fellow student, and they had a son, Cullen. McCarthy 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. In 1965 he published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper and his editor at Random House was Faulkner's long time editor, Albert Erskine. 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 visit the home of his Irish ancestors (a King Cormac McCarthy built Blarney Castle) in 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. Inspired by actual events in Sevier County, it garnered mixed reviews, some praising it as great, while others found it despicable. Like Outer Dark, before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. From 1974-75, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which premiered in January 1977. This screenplay, too, was based on actual historical events; the locale was South Carolina. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press. 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. It was said by many to be McCarthy's best work to date, and some critics still maintain that it is his finest novel. However, the book drew some negative reviews, too. Blood Meridian was published in 1985, but received little review attention at the time. Now, however, it is considered a turning point in his career. Some critics prefer his recent western writing, of which Blood Meridian was the first example. Others feel that he has strayed too far from his roots, that his westerns lack something. But Blood Meridian, followed closely by Suttree, is now generally regarded as McCarthy's finest work to date. McCarthy did extensive research for the novel, and it is based quite heavily on actual events. The author visited all the locales of the book and even learned Spanish to further his research. The first volume of the "Border Trilogy", All the Pretty Horses, was published by Knopf in 1992 and won the National Book Award and is his best-known work and the first book in his “Border Trilogy”. Unlike McCarthy's earlier books, this one became a publishing sensation, garnering many excellent reviews. It became a New York Times bestseller, and sold 190,000 copies in hardcover within the first six months of publication. It finally gave McCarthy the wide readership that had eluded him for many years. All the Pretty Horses was followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The Crossing features the tale of Billy Parham's attempt to return a trapped she-wolf to its home in the northern Mexican mountains and the tragic consequences of his adventure. McCarthy edited a play he had written in the mid-1970s, which was published in the summer of 1994 by Ecco Press. Called The Stonemason, the tragedy explores the fortunes of three generations of a black family in Kentucky. 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. Talk show host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novel, The Road, as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. |
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