CORMAC McCARTHY

1. CORMAC McCARTHY

2. Born in Rhode Island in 1933. • He is the third of six children. • Originally named Charles after his father. He changed his name to Cormac after the Irish King. Cormac, in Gaelic, means “son of Charles.” • Went to the University of Tennessee where he majored in liberal arts. • McCarthy served four years in the U.S. Air Force.

3. McCarthy published his first two short stories “A Drowning Incident” and “Wake for Susan” between 1957-1959. • He won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. • McCarthy worked as a mechanic while he wrote his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. • He and his wife lived in an actual barn. He renovated the barn into a home.

4. McCarthy’s Border Trilogy gained him fame and rave reviews. • This series gained him the wide readership that he had not had before. • His favorite novel is Moby Dick. • McCarthy hates to talk about writing and dislikes giving interviews. He has only interviewed on television once. • The Road was published in 2006. It earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

5. His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film, which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture. • His earlier Blood Meridian placed number three in a 2006 Time poll on a list of the greatest American novels of the previous 25 years and among the 100 best English-language books published between 1925 and 2005. • Labeled as one of the four major novelists of his time.

6. The idea for the novel came to him while visiting El Paso, Texas. He imagined what the city would look like in the future and began to think of his son. The two combined ideas came together for the novel. • The novel is a post-apocalyptic tale about a father and son and their journey together in a barren and dead world. The Road