Biography
This page uses content from the Cormac McCarthy biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.
For the musician Cormac McCarthy, see Cormac McCarthy (musician).
Cormac McCarthy (born July 20, 1933) is an American novelist who has authored ten novels in the Southern Gothic, post-apocalyptic fiction, and western genres.
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.
Biography
McCarthy's family moved to Knoxville in 1937. He is the third oldest of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. In Knoxville he attended Catholic High School. His father was a successful lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1967.
McCarthy entered the University of Tennessee in 1951-1952 and was a liberal arts major. In 1953 he joined the US Air Force for four years, he spent two years of this time in Alaska where he hosted a radio show. In 1957 he returned to the University of Tennessee. During this time in college he published two stories in a student paper and won Ingram-Merril award in 1959 and 1960. In 1961 he and fellow university student Lee Holleman were married and had their son Cullen. He left school without earning a degree and 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.
His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. He sent the manuscript to Random House because, in his words, "it was the only publisher I had heard of." At Random House the manuscript found Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962. Mr. 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 he shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania. He hoped to visit Ireland, and met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. They married in England in 1966. During that year McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. He used the grant to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza where McCarthy wrote his second novel Outer Dark. After he returned to America with his wife, Outer Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.
In 1969 McCarthy was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing and he moved with his wife to Louisville, Tennessee. They moved into a barn there, which McCarthy renovated. Here he wrote his next book Child of God which was published in 1973 and based on actual events. Like Outer Dark before it Child of God was set in southern Appalachia.
In 1975 McCarthy began to work with Richard Pearce on a screenplay for 'The Gardener's Son'. The film was part of a series for Public Television and aired in January, 1977.
In 1976 McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979 McCarthy's next novel Suttree was published. He had been writing Suttree on and off for twenty years.
In 1981 McCarthy was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He supported himself with this money while he wrote his next novel Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West which was published in 1985. This novel found the author switching the setting of his books to the Southwestern U.S. McCarthy's fans often regard the novel as his finest work. It tells the story of a teenager who finds himself riding with a vicious gang of outlaws who are being paid by the Mexican government to bring back Indian scalps. The book unflinchingly depicts horrific acts of violence committed by Americans, Indians and Mexicans alike. Critics have noted strong gnostic elements in Blood Meridian.
Despite several awards and a number of positive reviews, McCarthy was not widely read until the publication of his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses (1992). The book, the first part of what McCarthy calls "The Border Trilogy," spent some time on bestseller lists and won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. It was later made into a film. The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998) rounded out the trilogy. In July 2005, McCarthy published his ninth book, No Country for Old Men. His tenth book, The Road was published in September of 2006 and tells the story of a father and son struggling to survive in a bleak and desolate post-apocalyptic America.
The novel No Country for Old Men is currently in production as a film, directed by the Coen Brothers, starring Tommy Lee Jones
McCarthy lives in the Tesuque area of Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife, Jennifer Winkley and their son John. He guards his privacy closely and rarely gives interviews; one of his few interviews (with the New York Times) described McCarthy as a "gregarious loner". He remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann. They met through the MacArthur Foundation, and McCarthy even line-edited the manuscript for Gell-Mann's book The Quark and the Jaguar (1994) (though Gell-Mann was too rushed and disorganized to take advantage of the suggestions).
Family
Children:
- Cullen McCarthy, son (with Lee Holleman)
- John McCarthy, son (with Jennifer Winkley)
Marriages:
- Lee Holleman, (1961) divorced
- Annie DeLisle, (1967 - divorced 1981)
- Jennifer Winkley (Married as of 2006)
Works
- The Orchard Keeper (1965) Pre-ISBN assignment
- Outer Dark (1968) Pre-ISBN assignment
- Child of God (1974) ISBN 0-394-48771-0
- Suttree (1979) ISBN 0-374-48213-1
- Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) ISBN 0-394-40027-5
- All the Pretty Horses (1992) ISBN 0-379-74439-4
- The Crossing (1994) ISBN 0-394-57475-3
- Cities of the Plain (1998) ISBN 0-649-42390-7
- No Country for Old Men (2005) ISBN 0-375-40677-8
- The Road (2006) ISBN 978-0-367-26543-2
- Sunset Limited (play)
- The Stonemason (play) (1995)
- The Gardener's Son (screenplay) (1976) ISBN 0-88001-481-4
Trivia
- McCarthy uses a blue Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter when writing.
- Director Wes Anderson has stated that his character of Eli Cash in the film The Royal Tenenbaums is loosely based on McCarthy.
Notes
External links
- The Cormac McCarthy Society
- "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" - 1992 interview with McCarthy from the New York Times.
- The Road Reviews at Metacritic.com
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