Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933 and grew up near Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a lawyer. He studied at the University of Tennessee on and off, with four years in the US Air Force in between, and left without a degree. His early novels, set in Appalachia, sold few copies, and he lived for years on grants and very little money.

He moved to El Paso, Texas, and turned to the Southwest. Blood Meridian (1985) follows a gang of scalp hunters on the Mexican border. All the Pretty Horses (1992) won the National Book Award and brought him a wide readership.

The Road (2006) follows a father and his young son as they walk south through a burned, gray America after an unnamed disaster, pushing a shopping cart and hiding from cannibal gangs. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a film in 2009. His prose is spare and uses little punctuation, and some critics find his violence excessive. He spent his later years at the Santa Fe Institute and died in Santa Fe in 2023.