Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolution

When the New York Times published the first print interview with Cormac McCarthy in 1992, the author was barely known outside a small group of academics, writers, and devoted readers. None of his books up to that point, among them Suttree and Blood Meridian, had sold more than five thousand copies in hardcover. But that same year McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses made the best-seller lists, and over the next two decades, with the publication of such books as No Country for Old Men, the basis for the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning film, and The Road, a Pulitzer Prize winner and an Oprah’s Book Club selection, McCarthy became a household name. In Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution, Daniel Robert King traces McCarthy’s journey from cult figure to literary icon. Drawing extensively on McCarthy’s papers and those of Albert Erskine, his editor and devoted advocate at Random House, as well as the latest in McCarthy scholarship, King investigates the changes that McCarthy’s work as a novelist,