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Cormac McCarthy was born Charles McCarthy in Rhode Island on July
20, 1933.
When he was four years old, his family moved to Knoxville,
Tennessee and his father
became a lawyer for the Tennessee
Valley Authority.
McCarthy spent some time at the University of Tennessee and in the
US Air Force in the 1950’s. 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. He left
the university for good and moved to Chicago. He also 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.
McCarthy
is the author of nine
Southern Gothic
and
Western
novels. He published his first novel,
The Orchard
Keeper, in
1965.
It was followed by
Outer Dark,
Child of God
and
Suttree.
These early works were all set in southern
Appalachia.
In the mid-1970s
McCarthy moved to
El Paso,
Texas, and
1985's
Blood Meridian,
Or the Evening Redness in the West
found the author switching the setting of his books to the
Southwestern
US..
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, a dark work set in
Texas in 1980. McCarthy guards his
privacy closely and rarely gives interviews. He lives in the
Tesuque
area of
Santa Fe, New
Mexico with his wife, Jennifer
Winkley and their son John.
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