Cormac McCarthy

In this postapocalyptic novel, a father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they...

Cormac McCarthy is a quiet, unassuming presence in American fiction today, but like the slow, measured voices of many of his characters, he speaks with an authority and conviction that demands an audience. All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's sixth novel, is a cowboy odyssey for modern times. Set in the late 1940s, it features the travels and toils of a 16-year-old East Texan named John Grady Cole, caught in the agonizing purgatory between adolescence...

Based on incidents that took place in the southwestern United States and Mexico around 1850, this novel chronicles the crimes of a band of desperados, with a particular focus on one, "the kid," a boy of fourteen.

The screenplay for McCarthy's classic film, bearing in full measure his gift-the ability to fit complex and universal emotions into ordinary lives and still preserve all of their power and significance; In the spring of 1975 the film director Richard Pearce approached Cormac McCarthy with a screenplay idea. Though already a widely acclaimed novelist, the author of such modern classics as The Orchard Keeper and Child of God, McCarthy had never before...

With this novel in dramatic form, McCarthy gives voice to existential dread and ultimate meaning.

One of America's most celebrated novelists, Cormac McCarthy announced his towering presence on the literary stage with his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Within the pages of this classic work, John Wesley Rattner, his uncle Ather, and bootlegger Marion Sylder find their lives dangerously entwined in pre-World War II Tennessee. There, the men's tragedies and struggles are mirrored by the looming specter of industrialization.

The story or Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there - a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters - he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

An encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. The two men begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing worldviews.

A holocaust has destroyed the world. Civilization lies in ruins. Nothing grows. The Man and his young son, the Boy, struggle across the devastated, post-apocalyptic landscape, pushing their belongings in a shopping cart, hoping to reach the coast. It is almost impossible to find any food. Life on the road is a deadly game of hide, seek, and devour with bloodthirsty bands of roving, starving, survivalist types, many of whom have fallen into cannibalism....