Kevin L. Cole, “McCarthy’s THE BORDER TRILOGY,” Explicator, 59, 3 (2001):
161–163.
Short essay focusing on images of absent, dead, or disempowered fathers, with
comparison to similar images in other novels by other American writers.
Cormac McCarthy Society website http://www.cormacmccarthy.com [accessed
18 March 2010].
Provides information about McCarthy’s life and work; links to relevant
resources including the online Cormac McCarthy Journal; a bibliography of
primary and secondary sources; updates about McCarthy conferences, and
emerging scholarship.
Denis Donoghue, “Dream Work,” New York Review of Books, 40 (24 June 1993):
5–6, 8–10.
Review of All the Pretty Horses that discusses the novel in relation to previous
works.
Jay Ellis, No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of
Cormac McCarthy, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Challenges interpretations of McCarthy’s characters that view them as simplistic
while focusing on images of space and domesticity and their relation to gender
and family in nine of the novels.
Stephen Frye, Understanding Cormac McCarthy (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2009).
Essential and comprehensive interpretation of each of McCarthy’s novels to date,
tracing his development as a writer, thematic and aesthetic interests, influences,
and place within American Western literary traditions.
Georg Guillemin, The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (College Station: Texas
A&M University Press, 2004).
In-depth analysis of McCarthy’s eight novels within the context of the pastoral
tradition, paying particular attention to his descriptions of landscape and human
relationships to it.
David Holloway, The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 2002).
Extensive study that uses a literary Marxist approach to interrogate the formal
aspects of the novels, including language and storytelling structure.
Robert L. Jarrett, Cormac McCarthy (New York: Twayne, 1997).
Overview of McCarthy’s life and work, which Jarrett divides into two “phases,”
regional and postmodern; discusses All the Pretty Horses in the context of the latter
in chapter 5, “The Border Trilogy: Individualism, History, and Cultural Crossing”
(pp. 94–120).
Susan Lee, “The Search for Utopia: Blood Imagery in McCarthy’s All the Pretty
Horses,” Explicator, 66 (Summer 2008): 189–192.
Short essay arguing that McCarthy’s use of blood is a symbol of life and of John
Grady Cole’s need to survive and “desire for utopia.”