Cormac McCarthy

Rick Wallach (University of Miami)

Ed. by Cristina Sandru, The Literary Encyclopedia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Nicole Kennedy (University of Newcastle), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 20 Jul 1933
Died 13 Jun 2023
Activity 1965-2022

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

McCarthy's Works

Save to Bookshelf

Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) was an American novelist, playwright and screenwriter. He was the author of two published short stories, twelve novels, two plays and two produced screenplays. Several works, including the unproduced screenplay

Whales and Men

, remain unpublished. At the time of his death he was working on a screenplay of his fifth novel,

Blood Meridian

He is best known for his dark, violent novels, which are set either in his childhood region of Appalachia or in the border lands of the southwestern United States and Mexico, and most recently for his Pulitzer Prize-winning apocalyptic novel The Road (2006). His vision of human nature and destiny is relentlessly pessimistic. Even so, his characters occasionally redeem themselves, or are redeemed to some extent, by gestures of

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4975 words

Citation: Wallach, Rick. "Cormac McCarthy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 June 2012; last revised 15 June 2023. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3026, accessed 13 May 2025.]

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