Cormac McCarthy Books in Order

About Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy published his first novel in 1965 and spent the next twenty years writing uncompromising, sparsely punctuated fiction about violence and landscape in the American South and Southwest while living in near-poverty. He was almost fifty when Blood Meridian (1985), now considered one of the greatest American novels ever written, found its first readers. The novel is set in the 1850s on the Texas-Mexico border and follows a nameless "kid" who joins a company of scalp hunters under the command of the psychopathic Judge Holden — it is brutal, biblical, and luminously written, and it marks the boundary of what the American novel can contain.

All the Pretty Horses (1992) was his first bestseller — a comparative accessibility that surprised critics who had loved Blood Meridian precisely for its difficulty. The Border Trilogy that it began (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) is a meditation on the end of the frontier and the end of a certain kind of American manhood. No Country for Old Men (2005) was adapted by the Coen Brothers into an Academy Award-winning film. The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize and — unusually for McCarthy — is a novel of pure love between a father and a son in a post-apocalyptic landscape. McCarthy died in 2023; his final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published in 2022.