27 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
ing program. After his military service McCarthy returned to the University of
Tennessee with renewed focus, enrolling in a course on fiction writing. His talent
and unique perspective were recognized by the English department, and two of
his short stories—“Wake for Susan” and “A Drowning Incident”—were published
in The Phoenix, a campus literary magazine. He also began to work on his future
novels. Despite his academic success, McCarthy left the university without a
degree to pursue a writing career.
Five years passed before McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965),
was published. During this time he married and divorced Lee Holleman, a
poet, with whom he had a son, Cullen; she later depicted their marriage in the
collection Desire’s Door (1991). He married his second wife, Anne DeLisle, in
1966; they divorced ten years later. Because of his reclusive nature and a desire
to devote himself entirely to his craft (he is notorious for not allowing anything
to interfere with writing), McCarthy refrained from holding a steady job and
subsisted on a series of grants and awards, including the William Faulkner
Foundation Award in 1965 (given to the best first novel by an American writer),
a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1966, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, and
the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius award” in 1981. These awards
enabled McCarthy to make ends meet as he toiled away on critically successful
yet commercially unprofitable novels such as Outer Dark (1968), Child of God
(1973), Suttree (1979), and Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West
(1985).
Blood Meridian is McCarthy’s fifth novel and the first to take place outside
of Tennessee. Having relocated to El Paso, Texas, he found new inspiration and a
fresh setting for his writing. The story follows an unnamed “kid” from age four-
teen to forty-three who roams the Southwest both alone and in the company of
a ruthless gang of “scalp hunters” intent on exterminating Indians and Mexicans.
Although the novel takes place in the Old West of the 1840s and 1850s, it runs
counter to traditional Westerns. The protagonist is passive, swept up in violence
that he neither willingly nor unwillingly participates in, and when given the
chance to kill a villain, he cannot. Critics were enthusiastic about the novel. In
2005 Time magazine chose it as one of the one hundred best novels published
since 1923, and in a 2006 survey conducted by The New York Times Book Review
it was ranked the third “best work of American fiction published in the last
twenty-five years.”
The publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first of his Border Trilogy,
ushered in a much more lucrative phase of McCarthy’s writing career and made
him well known to the general reading public. Less dark and violent than his
earlier works, the novel has the elements of a coming-of-age tale, romance, and
action-filled Western. The combination proved to be more accessible to general
reading audiences and became his most successful novel to date, selling 190,000
copies in hardcover within the first six months of publication. The book was
on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-one weeks and won both the
National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Although
themes of violence, brutality, and the struggle against evil are present in All the
Pretty Horses, it also features, for the first time, a protagonist with the makings