CORMAC MCCARTHY Biography - Writers

 
 

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CORMAC MCCARTHY

Name: Cormac McCarthy                                                               
Born: July 20, 1933                                                                 
                                                                                     
Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy, (born July 20, 1933 in Providence,           
Rhode Island), is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist who has written ten     
novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He also has     
written plays and screenplays.                                                       
                                                                                     
Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American             
novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth.     
He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes     
to Herman Melville.                                                                 
                                                                                     
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933, and         
moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. He is the third of six       
children, with three sisters and two brothers. In Knoxville, he attended             
Knoxville Catholic High School. His father was a successful lawyer for the           
Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1967.                                       
                                                                                     
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 I had heard of." At Random House, the manuscript found its way to         
Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962.   
Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the next twenty years.