Background
Cormac McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, Providence, Rhode Island, United States as Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.; the eldest son of Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy. Cormac also has two brothers and three sisters.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where Cormac studied in 1951-1952, and in 1957-1959.
Cormac McCarthy, 1965
Tommy Lee Jones and Cormac McCarthy in The Sunset Limited (2011)
Cormac McCarthy at an event for The Sunset Limited (2011)
Samuel L. Jackson and Cormac McCarthy at an event for The Sunset Limited (2011)
Cormac McCarthy and Paula Mae Schwartz
Producer Steve Schwartz, writer Cormac McCarthy, producer Bob Weinstein, director John Hillcoat and producer Paula Mae Schwartz attend the premiere of 'The Road' at Clearview Chelsea Cinemas on November 16, 2009 in New York City.
Author Cormac McCarthy
Author Cormac McCarthy
Author Cormac McCarthy
Author Cormac McCarthy
In 2007 McCarthy received Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road.
In 2008 McCarthy received Premio Ignotus for The Road.
In 2008 McCarthy received Maltese Falcon Award, Japan, for No Country for Old Men.
Viggo Mortensen (left) and Kodi Smit-McPhee in the John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road (2009)
Javier Bardem in Joel and Ethan Coen's crime thriller film, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of the same name.
Javier Bardem (right) and Michael Fassbender in a crime thriller film The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Cormac McCarthy.
(Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in th...)
Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, the novel tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679728724/?tag=2022091-20
1965
(In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, ...)
In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679728740/?tag=2022091-20
1973
(By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses...)
By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679736328/?tag=2022091-20
1979
(An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended...)
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679728759/?tag=2022091-20
1985
(The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac Mc...)
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679744398/?tag=2022091-20
1992
(In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of ...)
In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of All the Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that is darker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum of a classic western and the elegaic power of a lost American myth.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679760849/?tag=2022091-20
1994
(Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed...)
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed first screenplay, the basis for an Emmy-nominated film—a taut, riveting intergenerational drama of fathers and sons, power, inequality, rage, and violence set in post-Civil War South Carolina.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062287540/?tag=2022091-20
1996
(In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-wi...)
In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing fashions a darkly beautiful elegy for the American frontier.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679747192/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limit...)
Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307278360/?tag=2022091-20
2011
Cormac McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, Providence, Rhode Island, United States as Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.; the eldest son of Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy. Cormac also has two brothers and three sisters.
McCarthy attended Catholic High School in Knoxville, and then entered the University of Tennessee majoring in liberal arts. After a year at the university (1951 – 1952), the author joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953; he served four years, spending two of them stationed in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show.
In 1957, McCarthy returned to the university, where he published two stories, “A Drowning Incident” and “Wake for Susan” in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix. While at the university, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. In 1959 McCarthy left the university again, thus never graduating it.
McCarty’s first novel The Orchard Keeper appeared in 1965. It was about a Tennessee man and his two mentors. The same year McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and using this money, he left America on the liner Sylvania, intending to visit the home of his Irish ancestors (a King Cormac McCarthy built Blarney Castle).
In 1966 another grant was given McCarthy, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966-68). The grant was used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, together with his second wife, where McCarty wrote his second novel, Outer Dark, about two incestuous siblings. In 1967, the McCarthys returned to America. They made Rockford, Tennessee, a town near Knoxville, their home. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968.
In 1969 Cormac was given another fellowship, this time the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He and his wife moved into a barn near Louisville, Tennessee. Child of God, about a lonely man’s descent into depravity, was published in 1973. The novel was filmed in 2013.
From 1974-75, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener’s Son, which premiered in January 1977. In 1976 McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lived for many years.
In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, Suttree, about a man who overcomes his fixation on death.
In 1981 McCarthy received a MacArthur Fellowship. The author used this money to write his next novel, Blood Meridian (1985), a violent frontier tale, hailed as his masterpiece. Blood Meridian tells the story of 14-year-old boy who joins a gang of outlaws hunting Native Americans along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1840s. The group is headed by a malevolent figure called the Judge, who leads the gang through a series of staggeringly amoral actions, through which McCarthy explores the nature of good and evil.
McCarthy achieved popular fame with All the Pretty Horses (1992; film 2000). Unlike McCarthy’s earlier books, this one became a publishing sensation, garnering many excellent reviews. The first volume of The Border Trilogy, it is the coming-of-age story of John Grady Cole, a Texan who travels to Mexico. The second installment, The Crossing (1994), set before and during World War II, follows the picaresque adventures of brothers Billy and Boyd Parham and centres around three round-trip passages that Billy makes between southwestern New Mexico and Mexico. The trilogy concludes with Cities of the Plain (1998), which interweaves the lives of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham through their employment on a ranch in New Mexico.
In 1999 McCarthy, together with his third wife and a son, moved from El Paso; they now reside in Tesque, New Mexico, on the outskirts of Santa Fe. McCarthy has taken a position as writer in residence with the Santa Fe Institute.
In 2005 No Country for Old Men, a bloody modern western that opens with a drug deal gone bad, was published. The Coen brothers adapted it into a 2007 film of the same name.
The next came his postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006), about a father and son struggle to survive after a disaster (left unspecified) that has all but destroyed the United States. A 2009 film adaptation was directed by John Hillcoat, written by Joe Penhall, and starred Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
He also wrote the plays The Stonemason (2001) and The Sunset Limited (2006; television movie 2011) and the screenplay for The Counselor (2013), a drama about drug trafficking. HBO subsequently produced a successful adaptation of The Sunset Limited starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones (directed by Jones), while The Counselor was filmed by Ridley Scott, and the cast included Brad Pitt, Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, and Cameron Diaz. The film was released on October 25, 2013.
In a 2017 appeared his essay "The Kekulé Problem", where McCarthy analyzed a dream of August Kekulé's as a model of the unconscious mind and the origins of language.
(The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac Mc...)
1992(In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of ...)
1994(Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in th...)
1965(Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed...)
1996(By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses...)
1979(Deft, spare, and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limit...)
2011(An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended...)
1985(In this magnificent new novel, the National Book Award-wi...)
1998(In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, ...)
1973(On the eve of becoming a married man, the Counselor makes...)
2013(Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocati...)
1968(In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to t...)
2005(The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and so...)
2006(A Play in Five Acts about four generations of an African ...)
1995Cormac was raised Roman Catholic.
McCarthy's work tends to be virtually devoid of typical themes like romance and sex. Instead, the writing is spare, often violent and relentless, with no fear to explore the darkest, ugliest parts of humanity. His books are always rooted in that most American of themes: the search for identity. In McCarthy it is often seen as an obsession with borders: of personal identity, of physical place, and of spiritual position within an existential realm of conflicting value systems.
Quotations:
“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
“I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.”
“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
“When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.”
“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”
“You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”
Cormac McCarthy is fluent in Spanish. He is a bibliophile with a personal library of over 7,000 books. He has in the past cited Moby Dick as his favorite book, while eschewing the work of writers who avoid larger, darker themes like death, such as Henry James.
In 1961 McCarthy married Lee Holleman, who had been a student at the University of Tennessee. They had one son, Cullen. Some time later, their marriage ended. In 1965, while on a trip to Ireland aboard the liner Sylvania, Cormac met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the Sylvania as a singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Anne DeLisle and Cormac McCarthy were separated in 1976. The marriage produced no children. They were divorced a few years later. In 1998 McCarthy married for a third time; he and his wife Jennifer Winkley have one child, John Francis, born 1999. McCarthy and Winkley divorced in 2006.