Family-owned ranches like John Grady’s were increasingly likely to be sold off. Because of new technologies and enhanced transportation, particularly the Eisenhower interstate highway system growing to crisscross the nation, this industrialized economy was spreading across the country with great homogenizing influence. McCarthy is notoriously private and has given few interviews over his long career.īy 1949, when the novel takes place, World War II had propelled the United States out of the Great Depression and into a period of rapid economic expansion. No Country for Old Men and The Road (a Pulitzer winner) are two of McCarthy’s more recent novels, both of which have been adapted to film. In 1999, McCarthy married for a third time to Jennifer Winkley, and they now live in Tesque, New Mexico, with their one child, John Francis. All the Pretty Horses, published in 1992, was his first book to become a New York Times bestseller and grant him a wider readership. In 1985, he published Blood Meridian, the first of his so-called “westerns,” followed by Suttree. McCarthy was awarded a Macarthur “Genius” grant in 1981. After a brief first marriage, he married a young English singer named Anne DeLisle, and in 1967 they moved to Rockford, Tennessee, though they divorced several years later and he moved to El Paso, Texas. He returned to school but never graduated, and instead worked as a mechanic in Chicago while writing his first novel The Orchard Keeper, which was published in 1965.

Raised Catholic, he studied liberal arts at the University of Tennessee for a few years before joining the U.S. Cormac McCarthy was born the third of six children in Rhode Island.

Mccarthy all the pretty horses