Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. He attended the University of Tennessee intermittently, served in the Air Force, and spent decades writing in near-total obscurity and poverty, supported by fellowships and the occasional advance. His early Appalachian novels—The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree—earned critical admiration but almost no readership. He moved to El Paso, Texas, in the 1970s, and the desert Southwest became the landscape of his greatest work. This author hub collects 2 works in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Blood Meridian.