
Seemed to be among them like a creeping plague. Of their fluid and collective selves into thatĬondition of separate and helpless paralysis which Reckon slowly with the remorselessness of this rendering The other eight were wilder than deer, scatteringĪlong the fence and bunching and running in a rising

Several vaqueros at the gate drinking coffee inĪ leisurely fashion and watching the proceedings.īy midmorning eight of the horses stood tied and In the trap blowing and glaring about there were Is his description of Cole breaking wild horses on a Mexican ranch:īy the time they had three of the horses sidelined Use of language, which manages to be both spare and poetic. What finally sets it apart and makes it extraordinary is McCarthy's Or to puncture the myths and the novel ends up being in many ways a traditionalĬowboy tale, merely refracted through a modern lens. The American Western overwhelm any intent he may have had to write an anti-western The coining of many compound words and the general sense of gloom that Use of punctuation (including the absence of quotation marks in dialogue), McCarthy's prose retains traces of his Faulknerian heritage in the minimal The relationship between men and horses and cattle and the passing of a Tragic (the boys eventually end up in jail), the book is centered around Of lightning and ends up losing his clothes and his horse in a storm) and

By turns comic (Blevins is deathly afraid Old Lacey Rawlins and along the way they meet up with Jimmy Blevins who Out on horseback for Mexico to find work. Of his line in many decades without a family ranch to work, so he sets The dissolution of his parents' marriage has left him the first I, for one, disliked the Southern books, but love the Westerns.Īll the Pretty Horses tells the story of 16 year old John GradyĬole. Was having sex in a watermelon patch, with a freakin' watermelon! I couldn't have been fifty pages into Suttree when someone The confusionĭeepened as those of us who had newly discovered him, returned to his earlier The book and that it was much darker than they understood. Many said he had sold out, others claimed that the mass audience misunderstood In 1993.) It also lead to the inevitable sniping by his adherents

(The novel won the 1992 National BookĪward for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction West and in 1992, All the Pretty Horses, the first book in whatĮnded up being his Border Trilogy, established him as a Western authorĪnd, not coincidentally, won him the audience and mainstream awards that Meridian in 1985, McCarthy began to turn his attention to the American Heir to Faulkner, his books were Southern gothic-drenched in violence, For the first twenty or thirty years of his career Cormac McCarthy wasĪ little known but critically acclaimed cult author.
