Biography of Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. 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). Originally named Charles (after his father), he renamed
himself Cormac after the Irish King (another source says that
McCarthy’s family was responsible for legally changing his name to
the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles”).
In 1937, when he was four, the family moved to Knoxville, and his
father became a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority (legal
staff 1934-67; chief counsel 1958-67). In 1967, the McCarthys moved
from Knoxville to Washington, D.C., where Charles was the principal
attorney in a law firm until his retirement.
Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. He attended Catholic High
School in Knoxville, then went to the University of Tennessee in
1951-52. His major: liberal arts. McCarthy 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.
From 1957-59, McCarthy returned to the university, 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. While at the university, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in
1959 and 1960.
McCarthy left the university again, this time for good. He went to Chicago, where he worked,
apparently as an auto mechanic, while writing his first novel. He later married Lee Holleman, who
had been a student at the University of Tennessee, and the couple settled in Sevier County,
Tennessee. They had one son, Cullen. Some time later, their marriage ended. (Lee McCarthy is the
author of several books of poetry, including Desire’s Door.)
Before his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published (1965—
McCarthy’s editor at Random House was Faulkner’s long-time
editor, Albert Erskine), McCarthy had received a traveling
fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In
1965, 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). While on the trip, he met Anne
DeLisle, a young English singer/dancer working on the ship; they
were married in England in 1966. Another grant was given
McCarthy in 1966, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966-68). He
and Anne toured southern England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and
Spain. Then they settled on the island of Ibiza, which was a kind of
artist’s colony at the time. Here, McCarthy completed revisions of
Outer Dark.
In 1967, though, possibly at Anne’s urging, the McCarthys returned
to America. They moved to Rockford, Tennessee, a town near
Knoxville. According to Anne, the McCarthys lived in a rented
house ($50 per month—to live at a pig farm). Outer Dark was
published by Random House in 1968. The reviews were again good,
as they had been for The Orchard Keeper.
1969 saw the arrival of another fellowship, this time the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative
Writing. He and his wife moved into a barn near Louisville, Tennessee. McCarthy renovated the
barn himself—entirely. Anne states that he added, among other
things, a stone room and chimney. All the stones he gathered, all the
wood he cut and kiln dried himself. Additionally, for his new
fireplace, McCarthy salvaged bricks from the boyhood home of James
Agee, which was being leveled to make way for downtown urban
renewal in Knoxville.
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.
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.
Anne DeLisle and Cormac McCarthy were separated in 1976 (no
children), and McCarthy moved soon after to El Paso, Texas, where
he lived for many years. They were divorced a few years later.
In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book which
had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty or so 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. At least one reviewer (who wrote for the
Memphis Press Scimitar) was roundly rebuked in a letter to the editor
written by novelist and historian Shelby Foote.
1981 brought another grant to McCarthy’s door (or, more literally, to
McCarthy’s room in a motel run by a friend in Knoxville), this time a
MacArthur Fellowship—one of their so-called genius grants. McCarthy
used this money to live on while writing his next novel, an apocalyptic
western set in Texas and Mexico during the 1840s and based heavily
on actual historical events.
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. The author visited all the locales of the
book and even learned Spanish to further his research.
After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random
House to Alfred A. Knopf. There, under the editorial advisement of
Gary Fisketjon, McCarthy began to get exposure. In connection with
the book’s publication and as a favor to his retiring editor Albert
Erskine, he granted The New York Times Magazine the sole interview
[link requires registration] to which (at that time) he had ever
submitted. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border
Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. 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.
McCarthy used the money he had made from All the Pretty Horses to buy a new pickup truck. He
kept on writing.
McCarthy edited and revised a play he had written in the mid1970s, 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. Shortly after the
publication of The Stonemason, Knopf released the second volume
of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing. It began life with a first
printing of 200,000 copies, a large printing for a work of literary
fiction. Sales were brisk enough to justify the second printing of
25,000 more copies before the end of the first month after
publication. The book 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.
The third volume of The Border Trilogy was published in 1998;
Cities of the Plain unites John Grady Cole, the main character of All
the Pretty Horses, with The Crossing‘s Billy Parham, and centers
on Cole’s doomed relationship with a Mexican prostitute. Not as
well-received by critics as the first two books in the Border Trilogy,
Cities of the Plain is nonetheless notable for its epilogue, which
reaches back to Suttree in its imagery and simultaneously casts the
entire Border Trilogy in a new and fascinating light, unifying the
previous two volumes of the trilogy.
Sometime around the publication of Cities of the Plain, McCarthy
married for a third time; he and his wife Jennifer Winkley have one
child, John Francis, born 1999. The McCarthys have also 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.
2005 brought the publication of No Country for Old Men, which
was adapted into an award-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen.
In 2006, Alfred A. Knopf published The Road, which won the
Pulitzer Prize for Literature. McCarthy granted an interview with
Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen The Road for her Book Club. The
Road was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Literature, and it also
won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
The Sunset Limited arrived in 2006. Commissioned by Chicago’s
Steppenwolf Theater, it premiered in May, with publication thereafter. The play takes place in a
shabby tenement apartment, where Black (a former convict) and White (a university professor)
discuss “big questions” about God, faith, life, and death following Black’s saving White, who had
attempted to commit suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming subway train. HBO subsequently
produced a successful adaptation of The Sunset Limited starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy
Lee Jones (directed by Jones).
Early 2013 brought the announcement that McCarthy had penned an original screenplay, The
Counselor. Little is currently known about the screenplay, but Ridley Scott directed, and the film is
slated for U.S. release in October of 2013. The story apparently deals with territory and themes
similar to that explored in No Country for Old Men.
Except for a few odds and ends (his favorite novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick; he doesn’t care for the
work of Henry James, he doesn’t like to talk about writing, etc.), that’s more or less what we know
about Cormac McCarthy.
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/biography/
Context of ‘All the Pretty Horses’
The first American colonials, the Puritans, envisioned the vast unexplored reaches of land to the west of the
colonies as a "desert wilderness," where danger lurked most obviously in the form of hostile Native
Americans. At the same time, however, the Puritans also thought of the American continent as somehow
sacred, a new promised land. As white Americans began to explore westward, these two attitudes remained
at the forefront of the American imagination. Ideas of the American West have become an important part of
our literature and mythology; they are pervasive in the American mind. For as long as white Americans
have lived on this continent, they have regarded the unsettled West with a mixture of fear and excitement.
It has been seen as a place of possibility but also of peril: a proving ground.
It is obvious, of course, that the history of the exploration and settlement of the country west of the original
colonies--with its attendant violence and savagery towards the Native Americans who already lived there--is
the history of the United States. Even the original colonies, as an unknown and uncivilized frontier for the
European colonists, were an expression of Western expansion. The great moments in the history of the
West are the great moments in American history: the Louisiana Purchase of western lands in 1803; the
Lewis and Clark overland expedition to the Pacific Northwest from 1804-1806; the mapmaking and
explorations of John C. Fremont in the late 1830s and 1840s; and the 1849 gold rush that brought
Americans westward in unprecedented numbers. The gold rush, especially, solidified in the American mind
an image of the West as a place of vast possibility. And other facets were being added to the vision: the West
was a place, far away from civilization, of violence and lawlessness; a place relatively devoid of women and
children, dominated by the men who explored and settled it first, governed by their codes of strength and
toughness; a place of lonely and awesome beauty. The West was, as the literary critic Jane Tompkins has
written, "a symbol of freedom, and of the opportunity for conquest."
While the boundaries of any geographical area that might be known as the "West" have changed
dramatically (for the Puritans, Western Massachusetts was quite far enough West), the popular imagination
began to delineate areas that represented the ideas they associated with the West. This was--again, in
Tompkins' words--"the West of the desert, of mountains and prairies." The West was the area in which
cowboys roamed along the great cattle trails. This West certainly existed. And the idea of the West as a
breeding ground for American traits of individualism and risk-taking, as a place of possibility where a poor
man might become rich, is surely an idea authenticated by history. But it must be said that the West as it is
popularly imagined--of cowboys and Indians, of "big-sky" country--was to a great extent a product of an
industry and a genre that has defined American culture in the past century: the Western.
Movies set within the Western experience comprise a significant percentage of American films. Everyone
has seen these movies, and recognizes their brave but antisocial heroes, their lawless villains, the sweep of
violins while a horse rides off into a sunset. For a generation of Americans, the cowboys they saw in the
movies became symbols of American masculinity. The Western novel, too, has been a popular form since
the first nineteenth-century dime-store pamphlets described, in terms so melodramatic and exaggerated as
to be formulaic, the exploits of the great heroes of the West. In the twentieth century, immensely popular
novelists like Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour have maintained the tradition of the Western novel (and in a
much better written form).
The end of the twentieth century saw a revision of popular attitudes about the West, as scholars in many
disciplines began to question previously accepted assumptions about America's historical and cultural
heritage. New attention, for instance, was given to the appalling treatment of Native Americans during the
Western expansion, and how this treatment was reflected in the Western movies that either vilified or
trivialized the Native American characters. Where in earlier generations the gunfighting past of the
American West was glorified--a symbol of American traditions of individualism and roughshod justice-many at the end of the twentieth century began to ask questions about the harmful impact of that violence
to our culture and to the men who used violence to justify their moral codes. It is telling that the best
American western of the 1990s was Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" (1993), an anti-Western, a story about
the human casualties and psychological scarring of gunfights. And it is telling that the great writer of
Western novels at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first is Cormac McCarthy.
Indeed, McCarthy is most probably the greatest writer of Western novels in American history, to such a
degree that his novels also transcend the "Western" genre. He may write in the tradition of Zane Grey and
Louis L'Amour, but he is certainly also an heir to America's towering literary geniuses, such as William
Faulkner--from whom McCarthy learned his long, flowing sentences--and Ernest Hemingway, whose
attitudes of heroic stoicism and quiet romanticism pervade McCarthy's prose.
McCarthy's great epic Border Trilogy--whose first novel, All the Pretty Horses, has become McCarthy's
most famous--tells the story of cowboys in the middle of the twentieth century, men who pursue a romantic
Western idea that has vanished and turned from history into myth. McCarthy writes about the dark and
unseen side of the Western idea: you will read in McCarthy's novels what you will never see in most
Western movies, stories about tragedy, cruelty, and blood without a heroic or redemptive ending. The irony
of All the Pretty Horses is that it exposes characters desperately trying to inhabit the cowboy myth--to
subscribe to the cowboy code of stoicism, understated nobility and great physical skill--in the realities of
exploration in a savage and uncivilized land. What emerges is a picture of what the West might really have
been, together with a picture of the human spirit under awesome moral pressure.
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/allthepretty/context.html
Summary of ‘All the Pretty Horses’
In All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy begins his Border Trilogy with a coming of age tale that is a
departure from the bizarre richness and mysterious violence of his early novels, yet in many ways preserves
the mystery and the richness in a more understated form. Like Blood Meridian, this novel follows a young
man’s journey to the regions of the unknown. John Grady Cole, more heroic than the protagonists of
McCarthy’s earlier novels, confronts the evil that is an inescapable part of the universe as well as the evil
that grows out of his own ignorance and pride. His story is told in a style often restrained and simple,
embedded with lyrical passages that echo his dreams and memory.
In the spring of 1948 on a small Texas ranch, sixteen year old John Grady Cole attends the funeral of his
grandfather, with whom he has lived since his parents’ separation. The grandfather’s ranch has been left to
John Grady’s mother, a small-time actress who has no interest in it and will sell it. John Grady’s father,
psychologically damaged by World War II and now physically ill as well, tells his son goodbye. With no
apparent future in Texas, and sensing the threat of the new era to the traditional life he values, John Grady
urges his old friend Rawlins to accompany him to Mexico. There, John Grady will find that his innocence,
or ignorance, will ultimately lead him close to destruction.
Before reaching the border they meet Jimmy Blevins, a dangerous young boy on a magnificent horse. Even
though Cole and Rawlins do not trust Blevins and are sure his horse is stolen, they allow him to join them
despite their doubts. As they ride into Mexico, they realize that they are no longer in a world that they can
understand. When Blevins’ clothes and horse disappear during a thunderstorm, they search a nearby
Mexican town, where they find the clothes and finally the horse. In spite of Rawlins’ voiced forebodings,
Blevins steals the horse back, and as John Grady and Rawlins flee the town Blevins gallops past them,
pursued by armed men.
John Grady and Rawlins ride south, coming at last to a ranch, the Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la
Purisima Conception. As they talk with the vaqueros about the possibility of employment, John Grady sees
a beautiful girl on a black horse, Alejandra, the daughter of hacendado Don Hector
Rocha y Villareal. The heir of an aristocratic family, Don Hector is avidly interested in breeding wild
mountain horses with his own stock, so John Grady and Rawlins join the vaqueros; John Grady amazes
everyone with his ability to break the wild horses quickly and gently.
When Don Hector questions Cole about his past, he omits the episode with Blevins and the fact that he and
Rawlins may now be wanted as accomplices in Blevins’s horse theft. Concerned about his blossoming
relationship with Alejandra, Duena Alfonsa, Don Hector’s aunt and Alejandra’s godmother, warns John
Grady away from the rebellious girl, and informs him that Don Hector will never allow her to marry an
American, especially a poor one. But Alejandra comes to him one night and they become lovers.
A few days later John Grady and Rawlins are arrested and taken to a jail in Encantada, where Blevins is
already imprisoned for the murder of three men. While the three Americans are transported to the state
prison at Saltillo, Blevins is taken from the group and shot. At the prison, they are questioned and beaten,
and Rawlins is injured seriously. John Grady, attacked by another prisoner, whom he must kill, learns that
evil exists not only in the world but in himself. When he and Rawlins are suddenly released as mysteriously
as they were arrested, Rawlins returns to Texas.
But John Grady goes back to La Purisima to search for Alejandra, who is not there. Once again Duena
Alfonsa makes clear to him the impossibility of the match. She tells her own story of the power of ignorance
and evil (her love for a man who was killed by a mob after helping depose the dictator Diaz) and of her
determination to protect Alejandra. Although John Grady does meet Alejandra one last time at a hotel in
Zacatecas, it is only as a farewell: she chooses her family’s approval (and perhaps their money). In pain,
Cole returns to Encantada where he finds Blevins’s horse, innocent like all animals and yet the cause of
much death and loss. John Grady captures both the horse and the brutal police captain who shot Blevins,
and heads homeward. En route, the captain is seized by brigands with a score to settle with him, and John
Grady finally returns to Texas.
He finds even less there than before: his father and his childhood nurse are both dead. He rides on with the
stolen horse, seeking to restore it to its rightful owner. John Grady has learned, but not yet enough; he has
left home and returned a changed man, but there is no home to receive him. All the Pretty Horses is a hero’s
quest without a neat resolution, a book in which the strange light of mythic struggles shines through the
quick-paced adventure.
The Border Trilogy continues with Volume Two, The Crossing, and concludes with the third volume, Cities
of the Plain.
http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/works/all-the-pretty-horses/
‘ALL THE PRETTY HORSES’: KEY SCENE ANALYSIS
Please include the following in your key scene analysis presentation:

Brief context/plot: What happens before this scene? What happens during this scene? What happens after
this scene?

Ideas: What is this scene about? What is McCarthy expressing about the world, society, culture and/or
human nature? McCarthy illustrates…

Key Quotes: What are the key quotes in this scene? How do these quotes justify and develop your ideas?

Analysis – Metalanguage: What are the key structures and features and/or novel conventions in this scene?
For example, characterisation, symbolism etc. What are the effects/purposes of these techniques? What do
they represent?

Analysis – Views and Values: What are the key social, historical and cultural aspects of this scene? How do
these factors further aluminate your ideas?