Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights, edited by Kimball
King (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 167–176.
Examines Mamet’s exploration of “American masculinity myths” as a vehicle for
indicting exploitative business practices.
—Linda Trinh Moser and Chelsea Russellh
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
(New York: Knopf, 1992)In Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses the death of a small doe leads pro-
tagonist John Grady to ponder the relationship between pain and beauty: “He
thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world’s
heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved
in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood
of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.” In all
his work, McCarthy reenacts the “blood of multitudes” in his depiction of the
West as an indifferent landscape that offers much less beauty and meaning than
his searching characters wish and need to find. Using language both sparse and
lyrical, he creates a dispassionate world where human experience is marked by
violence and death, and where redemption and transcendence play little if any
part. Although he is criticized for extreme images of violence, especially in the
earlier works, both literary critics and popular readers have come to embrace his
revision of the traditional Western.
Most of McCarthy’s works take place in Tennessee, Texas, or Mexico. Those
written from 1959 to 1979, what critic Dianne C. Luce calls his “Tennessee
period,” draw from his experiences in the state he moved to as a child. Born
Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. on 20 July 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, the
third child of Charles Joseph (his namesake) and Gladys McGrail McCarthy,
he was called Cormac after an Irish king and because it means “son of Charles.”
When he was four the family moved to Knox County, just outside of Knoxville,
Tennessee, where two more children were born into the family. Like the other
children he grew up around, McCarthy participated in outdoor activities—hunt-
ing, fishing, riding horses—despite being somewhat of an outsider, considered
different because of his family’s economic status. Charles Sr. was Yale-educated,
an attorney whose jobs with the U.S. Justice Department and the Tennessee Val-
ley Authority provided comfortably for the family in an area where most people
lived in two- or three-room shacks.
After graduating from a Roman Catholic high school in Knoxville, McCar-
thy attended the University of Tennessee for a year (1951–1952) as a liberal arts
major. He then spent another year working a series of odd jobs before joining the
U.S. Air Force in 1953. McCarthy spent two of his four years of service in Alaska,
where he worked as a radio-show host and devoted himself to an intensive read-