Cormac McCarthy his biography and literary career

1.

Cormac McCarthy
his biography and literary career

2.

• Cormac McCarthy is an
American author, playwright,
and screenwriter, best known
for his Western characters
and historical settings in his
novels. Cormac McCarthy is
a Pulitzer award-winning
American writer. He has 10
novels to his credit with the
fifth one, Blood Meridian
being listed among the 100
best English-language books
published since 1923, by
Times magazine in 2005.

3.

• Cormac McCarthy was born in
Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He is
the third of six children born to
Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina
McGrail McCarthy. He received
education at the St. Mary’s Parochial
School and later moved to Knoxville
Catholic High School. After
graduation, he enrolled at the
University of Tennessee. During his
days at the University, he began
writing. He changed his first name
from Charles to Cormac to prevent
being associated with Edgar
Bergen’s character Charlie McCarty.

4.

• The
Orchard
Keeper,
published in 1965, was his
first novel. Set is a remote
community
in
rural
Tennessee in the years
between the two world wars,
it is the story of a young boy
and a bootlegger who,
unbeknownst to either of
them, has killed the boy's
father.

5.

• In 1979, McCarthy wrote
Suttree, his fourth novel, which
was about a man’s obsession
with death. it is the story of
Cornelius Suttree, who has
forsaken a life of privilege with
his prominent family to live in a
wrecked houseboat on the
Tennessee
River
near
Knoxville.

6.

• In 1985, he published Blood
Meridian, the tale of a 14-yearold boy who joins a gang of
criminals. Over the years, it
came to be known as one of
the author’s finest works.
McCarthy apparently went to
all the destinations mentioned
in the book and also learned
Spanish to enrich his research
for the book.

7.

• In
2006,
Cormac
McCarthy published The
Road. The book, which
was a post-apocalyptic
tale centered around a
father-son duo, earned
the Pulitzer Prize for
Literature in 2007. It was
later made into a movie.

8.

To date, Cormac McCarthy
has published ten novels.
The Orchard Keeper (1965)
Outer Dark (1968)
Child of God (1974)
Suttree (1979)
Blood Meridian, Or the
Evening Redness in the
West (1985)
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
The Crossing (1994)
Cities of the Plain (1998)
No Country for Old Men
(2005)
The Road (2006)
In addition, McCarthy has
published
two
screenplays
and
two
plays:
The Stonemason: A Play in
Five Acts (1994)
The Gardener’s Son: A
Screenplay (1996)
The Sunset Limited: A Novel
in Dramatic Form (2006)
The Counselor: A
Screenplay (2013)
He is also known to be the
author of three as-yet
unpublished screenplays:
Whales and Men
Cities of the Plain (1984)
No Country for Old Men
(n.d., but “began as a
screenplay in 1984”)
Other works by McCarthy
include two short stories:
“Wake for Susan” (1959)
“A Drowning Incident”
(1960)

9.

Style of writing
• McCarthy’s works are usually known for their difficult narrative
style, their Southern gothic features, and their violence.
McCarthy’s novels are rarely domestic, and instead follow
alienated individuals through rough wastelands and American
deserts. His characters are rifle-wielding or horse-riding
outcasts attempting to assert their wills on an uncaring modern
world.
• McCarthy avoids using punctuation and pauses in his
sentences as he considers them unnecessary. For instance, he
does not use commas in many places and instead, replaces it
with the conjunction ‘and’.
• McCarthy insists that all literature should ‘deal with issues of life
and death’.

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