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Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy (born July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island), is an American novelist who has written ten novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road. He also has written plays and screenplays.

Literary critic Harold Bloom 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

Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933, and moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. In Knoxville, he attended Knoxville 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 United States Air Force for four years, two of which he spent 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 the Ingram-Merrill 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.

McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. He decided to send the manuscript to Random House because "it was the only publisher I had heard of." At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the next twenty years.

In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania, hoping to visit Ireland. While on the ship, he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel Outer Dark. Afterward he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.

In 1969, McCarthy and his wife moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a barn, which McCarthy renovated, even doing the stonework himself. Here he wrote his next book Child of God, based on actual events. Child of God was published in 1973. Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979, his novel Suttree was finally published. He had been writing Suttree on and off for twenty years. Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, he wrote his next novel Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which was published in 1985. In a 2005 review of No Country for Old Men, the New Yorker magazine, despite admitting McCarthy a "colossally gifted writer", dismissed the novel as "an unimportant, stripped-down thriller". The film of No Country for Old Men adapted by the Coen brothers has gone on to win 4 Oscars and over 75 film awards globally.

McCarthy now lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico, area, north of Santa Fe, with his wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy closely and rarely gives interviews. In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy is described as a "gregarious loner" and reveals that he is not a fan of authors that do not "deal with issues of life and death" citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.". McCarthy 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.

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novel, The Road, as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. In addition, McCarthy agreed to sit down for his first ever television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute; McCarthy told Oprah that he does not know any writers and much prefers the company of scientists. During the interview he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he has endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road.

Family

Children:

  • Cullen McCarthy, son (with Lee Holleman)
  • John Francis McCarthy, son (with Jennifer Winkley)

Marriages:

  • Lee Holleman, (1961) divorced
  • Annie DeLisle, (1967 - divorced 1981)
  • Jennifer Winkley (Married as of 2006)

Bibliography

Novels

Screenplays

Plays

Film and television adaptations

Awards

Criticism

B. R. Myers listed McCarthy as one of "America's pretentious authors" in his article "A Reader's Manifesto", published in the Atlantic Monthly, August 2001.

Notes

External links



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