The mastermind behind "The Road"

                Cormac McCarthy the author of this month's Readster book discussion was born in Rhode Island on July 20th, 1933. He was named after his father Charles McCarthy, and later renamed himself after the Irish King. While growing up in Knoxville, he attended a Catholic High School. Upon graduating he attended the University of Tennessee for two years majoring in liberal arts. The then joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953. During this time he was briefly stationed in Alaska where he hosted a radio show.

                After spending four years in the Air Force he returned to university. While attending he published two stories, "A Drowning Incident" and "Wake for Susan" in a student literary magazine. During the time he spent at university he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. He left the university shortly after that to work in Chicago as an auto mechanic while writing his first novel. After marrying his first wife Lee Holleman, they moved to Tennessee and had a son named Cullen. His marriages later ended.

     

           McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, shortly before his first novel The Orchard Keeper, was published. In 1965 he took fellowship to visit the home of his Irish ancestors. During this he met an English woman named Anne DeLisle, and was married in England. The following year he received another grant this time from the Rockefeller Foundation. Cormac and Anne traveled in Western Europe and settled on in Ibiza. During this settlement he completed a revision of Outer Dark.

                The McCarthy's returned to America in 1967 and in 1968 Random House published Outer Dark. The following year the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing was awarded to Cormac. In 1973 he published Child of God and from '74-'75 he worked on a screen play for PBS entitled "The Gardener's Son." Between the finishing of the film and the premiere in January 1977, Cormac and Anne separated.

                His fourth novel Suttree took him over twenty years to finish and was published in 1979. Many critics say this is his finest novel. Cormac received the MacArthur Fellowship "genius" grant in 1981, which he used to live on while writing an apocalyptic western set in Texas and Mexico during the 1840's.  The turning point in his career is considered to be when he published Blood Meridian in 1985.

                In the early '90's under a new publisher he began working on a The Border Trilogy. In 1992 the first volume All the Pretty Horses was published. It became a bestseller and sold 190,000 copies in the first six months. The second volume The Crossing printed 200,000 for presale and a second printing of 25,000 in the first month. The final volume of The Border Trilogy is Cities of the Plain which was published in 1988. He remarried to Jennifer Winkley and had one child, John Francis, born in 1999.

                McCarthy published No Country for Old Men in 2005, and it was adapted into an award-winning film. In 2006 he published The Road which won the Pulitzer Prize for Litearture. The Road was featured on Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, and also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The movie "The Counselor" which was released October 25th, 2013 in theaters was originally penned by McCarthy.

For more information about Cormac McCarthy visit: http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/

Readsters venture down Cormac McCarthy's Post-apocalyptic novel: The Road

                The New York Times Book Review says The Road is "vivid, eloquent...The Road is the most readable of [McCarthy's] works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization." The Los Angeles Times Book Review says "One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal."

                So what is The Road? Amazon describes The Road as "The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.
                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. The 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 are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
                The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, 'each the other's world entire,' are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."

                Copies of The Road are available for check-out at the library.