The Best Works: Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy was born on the 20th of July, 1933 in Rhode Island in the USA - he was one of six children born to an Irish-Catholic couple called Gladys and Charles. When McCarthy was 4, his family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee because of his father's job and by 1941, after moving to various places over Knoxville, the family finally settled in the south section of the city.

Attending strictly catholic schools, McCarthy saw no use in attending school or being an altar boy, choosing to pursue his own interests instead. By the 50s, he was attending the University of Tennessee but dropped out by 1953 and joined the air force. Whilst in Alaska, where he was stationed, he would read voraciously and host a radio show. It was in 1957 that McCarthy would begin publishing his own short stories in a magazine called "The Phoenix" and then, went on to win an award for them. In 1959, he dropped out of the force and went to Chicago.

He got married in 1961 to Lee Holleman and they moved into a very cheap home near the Smoky Mountains. Cullen was born in 1962 - the couple's first child. In 1965, he published his first book called "The Orchard Keeper" and it was published by Random House. It won the Faulkner award for a debut novel in 1966.

After his divorce, Cormac McCarthy married an Englishwoman called Anne DeLisle and the two of them moved to Tennessee in 1969. While living in poverty with his new wife, Cormac McCarthy wrote "Child of God" as he was sitting in a barn.

From the 70s to the 90s, McCarthy received a number of accolades and even wrote a semi-autobiographical novel called "Suttree" - which was started 20 years before it was published. Many critics likened it to a 'doomed Huckleberry Finn'. After acquiring a grant from the MacArthur Fellowship, Cormac McCarthy moved to the South West to study the premise for his novel "Blood Meridian".

It was not until 1992 that McCarthy would start to get actually commercial acclaim though - his publication of "All the Pretty Horses" was considered a masterpiece and before it was published, nothing by McCarthy sold more than 5'000 copies. In 2005, Cormac McCarthy penned the mesmerisingly dark "No Country for Old Men" which was originally conceived as a screenplay but written as a novel. The Coen Brothers turned it into a screenplay, and then a 2007 movie. It went on to win 75 different film awards including 4 Oscars.

In 2006, Cormac McCarthy wrote and published one of his key novels: "The Road" and it was turned into a movie in 2009 starring Viggo Mortensen. It got mixed acclaim but stayed faithful to the novel the whole time.

"The Sunset Limited" is a more recent book published by Cormac McCarthy and then was adapted into a 2011 HBO Movie starring Samuel L Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones.

Harold Bloom, a key literary critic, named Cormac McCarthy as one of the four greatest American novelists of his time. McCarthy's style has often been considered difficult and tense, some of his works have also been considered for the Great American Novel. Until 2009, McCarthy typed out all of his works on the typewriter he bought in Knoxville in 1963 for $50. It was put on auction for over $10 Million.

Currently, Cormac McCarthy does a lot of work with the Santa Fe Institute and even though his 2015-announced novel "The Passenger" was due to be released in 2016, it has not yet been released as of 2020.

What we're going to do now is go through the top books written by Cormac McCarthy and though you may not have read them all, it'll give you some reading to do! McCarthy is a brilliant author and a great man in the history of American Literature. He brings the spirit of Old America to us along with its incredibly dark aura.

Here are his best works according to me:

5. Child of God

4. The Road

3. No Country for Old Men

2. Blood Meridian

1. All the Pretty Horses