Cormac McCarthy died last week at 89, leaving behind as provocative a body of work as any American novelist. His writing has always had fervent admirers, even his early Tennessee novels, written in thrall to William Faulkner, that initially sold few copies. But he was largely unknown to the reading public before the publication, in 1992, of All The Pretty Horses—after which he became one of the granite monuments of American letters.
Even then he had detractors, who found his cowboy philosophy risible and his prose mannered. James Wood, who largely admired McCarthy, once called him “one of the great hams of American literature.” McCarthy’s fans were themselves divided between those who loved the early work and those who favored his mid-career Westerns, with a dissident third faction arguing for the austere late style of The Road and No Country For Old Men. A novelist who generates such passions must be onto something. His death seems finally to have settled the foundational question: he is now treated as the genius he implicitly claimed to be.
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