Cormac McCarthy was born Charles McCarthy is a Pulitzer award-winning American writer. Born on July 20, 1933, his novel works encompasses Southern Gothic, Western and post-apocalyptic genres. He has ten novels to his credit with the fifth one, Blood Meridian being listed among the100 best English-language books published since 1923, by Times magazine in 2005. In 1992, he published the novel All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Critics Circle and the National Book Awards and later adapted into motion pictures. A film adaptation of his novel No Country for Old Men was released in 2007. The film won four Academy Awards. His other works including Child of God, The Road were also adapted as motion pictures.

Early Life And Education

Cormac McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island to Charles Joseph McCarthy and Gladys Christina (née McGrail) McCarthy. He has five other siblings. At the age of four, the family moved to Knoxville. While there, his father served as the attorney for the Tennessee Valley Authority. He received education at the St. Mary’s Parochial School and later moved to Knoxville Catholic High School. After graduation, he enrolled at the University of Tennessee in 1951 but dropped out the following year.

He again entered in 1957 and again left without graduating. During his days at the University, two of his stories published in The Phoenix won Ingram Merrill Award for creative writing. He changed his first name from Charles to Cormac to prevent being associated with Edgar Bergen’s character Charlie McCarty.

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Writing Career

In 1965, McCarthy through Random House published his maiden novel, The Orchard Keeper. At Random House, Albert Erskine edited the manuscript of The Orchard Keeper, and he would continue to edit Cormac McCarthy’s works for the next two decades. That same year, he gained a Travelling Fellowship from The American Academy of Arts and Letters and therefore decided to travel to Ireland aboard the liner Sylvania. It was on this ship that he met his first wife, Anne DeLisle. Anne was working as a singer on the ship.

The following year, he earned a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to travel through Southern Europe, settling in Ibiza. While there, he wrote the novel, Outer Dark, published in 1968 after he returned to the United States. His next novel was Child of Gods in 1973. In 1979, he published his long awaiting novel, Suttree; he had been working on the novel for about 20 years.

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