Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

Lindsey Michael Banco (University of Saskatchewan)

Ed. by Padraig Kirwan, Goldsmiths College, University of London
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), 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

First circulation or publication 2005

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

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Cormac McCarthy’s body of fiction often offers a relentless, unsparing examination of violence, but it is also mercurial and unpredictable. In the middle part of his career, for instance, he worked within the tradition of the western. Four novels—his putative masterpiece,

Blood Meridian

(1985), and the three books comprising the Border Trilogy:

All the Pretty Horses

(1992),

The Crossing

(1994), and

Cities of the Plain

(1998)—all owe a large debt to the genre, while simultaneously dismantling many of its expectations, ideologies, and aesthetics. Those works also explore the vast philosophical questions about good, evil, and fate for which McCarthy is known. Then, in 2005, he published

No Country for Old Men

. Like the four previous novels,

No Country for Old Men

draws on many of the…

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2497 words

Citation: Banco, Lindsey Michael. "No Country for Old Men". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 September 2016 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=31212, accessed 20 April 2024.]

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