Cormac McCarthy
The latter half of the twentieth century saw American fiction turn toward landscapes of extremity — moral, geographic, and linguistic — where inherited literary forms were tested against violence, isolation, and the ambiguities of the frontier. Cormac McCarthy, born in Providence on July 20, 1933, became one of the distinctive voices working within that charged atmosphere, writing in English and Spanish across a career that moved from the American South to the borderlands of the Southwest.
Educated at Knoxville Catholic High School and the University of Tennessee, McCarthy worked as a novelist, playwright, and film screenwriter. His novels include Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road, alongside the three volumes collected as The Border Trilogy. These works span a range of settings and registers while returning repeatedly to landscapes where human endurance is measured against extreme circumstance. His writing in both English and Spanish gave his border narratives a particular texture, grounding them in the linguistic realities of the regions he depicted.
Recognition came from multiple directions across his career. McCarthy received the Lillian Smith Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The Road brought him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He died in Santa Fe on June 13, 2023, at the age of eighty-nine — a death that closed a career marked by honors accumulated across decades of work in the novel, the play, and the screenplay.
Quotes by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's insights on:
You fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain't nothin' to be done about it, it ain't even a problem. It's just an aggravation.
It is all right for the lion and the lamb to lie down together if they are both asleep, but if one of them begins to get active, it is dangerous.
She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun’s eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.
I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers.
They put their animals to the ford and crossed, the water up under the horses’ bellies and the horses picking their way over the rocks and glancing wildly upstream where a cataract thundered out of the darkening forest into the flecked and seething pool below.