Cormac McCarthy

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Cormac McCarthy bigraphy, stories - Novelist

Cormac McCarthy : biography

20 July 1933 –

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy; July 20, 1933) is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and Post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses (1992) he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Pretty Horses and The Road were also adapted as motion pictures.

Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time magazine’s list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 Retrieved on 2008-06-03. and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Retrieved on 2008-06-03. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying". In 2010 The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. McCarthy has been increasingly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.Svenska Dagbladet, October 7, 2010, Här är favoriterna till litteraturpriset .. (english: These are the favourites for the literature price ..,) or Svenska Dagbladet dated Oktober 7, 2009, last change October 8, 2009: Vem tror/vill du ska få årets Nobelpris i litteratur? (english: Who do you think/do you want to get the Nobel Prize in Literature this year?

Film and television adaptations

  • The Gardener’s Son was part of a series for PBS and aired in January 1977. McCarthy wrote the screenplay upon request for director Richard Pearce.
  • In 2000, McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses was made into a film directed by Billy Bob Thornton, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz.
  • McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into a 2007 Academy Award-winning film directed by the Coen Brothers and starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem.
  • A film based on the novel The Road began development in 2007. John Hillcoat directed this adaptation by Joe Penhall. The leading roles include Viggo Mortensen as the father, Kodi Smit-McPhee as the boy, Charlize Theron as the wife, and Robert Duvall as the old man. The film opened on November 25, 2009 to mostly positive reviews.
  • An adaptation of McCarthy’s 2006 play The Sunset Limited aired on HBO in February 2011. It stars Tommy Lee Jones (who also directs) and Samuel L. Jackson.
  • A film adaptation of Blood Meridian has been rumored for years. The names of James Franco, Todd Field, and Scott Rudin have been connected to the project, which has fallen through at least twice.

Writing career

McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. He decided to send the manuscript to Random House because "it was the only publisher [he] had heard of". At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who had been William Faulkner’s editor until Faulkner’s death in 1962. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy’s work for the next twenty years.

In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania, hoping to visit Ireland. While on the ship, he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark. Afterward he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.