I first encountered Cormac McCarthy’s name in an interview between Gus Van Sant and the late David Foster Wallace. The interview is very late-’90s, and it fills me with nostalgia for a time when the status quo relationship to art in America was not primarily one of political and social expectation. Because the conversation took place the better part of a decade before McCarthy won the Pulitzer and his name exploded into the popular conversation about literature — a writer who had done only two interviews before that was suddenly on Oprah and in Rolling Stone — Wallace discusses him the way you would a lesser-known writer. A writer’s writer. Because of the way Wallace talked about Blood Meridian — it was the greatest Western, it was horrific, the language biblical — I brought it to the attention of HRH, my former high school English teacher. I had not yet read the book, but I felt its dark, humming presence out there in the world, waiting for me.
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