Cormac McCarthy is 75 today.
The Writer’s Almanac has a good short profile that includes this:
It wasn’t until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 that McCarthy finally became widely recognized. It’s about a 16-year-old Texas rancher who leaves his family and rides into northern Mexico looking to make his fortune. None of McCarthy’s first five novels had sold more than 2,500 hardcover copies, but All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award and sold almost 200,000 copies in less than six months. It’s since been made into a Hollywood movie. McCarthy used the money to buy a new truck.
And there’s this from the Cormac McCarthy web site:
Critics have compared Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish yet beautifully written adventure masterpiece, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, with the best works of Dante, Poe, De Sade, Melville, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and William Styron. The critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the Twentieth Century, and perhaps the greatest by a living American writer. Critics cite its magnificent language, its uncompromising representation of a crucial period of American history, and its unapologetic, bleak vision of the inevitability of suffering and violence.
And, of course, McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was made into last year’s Oscar winner for best picture. The Coen brothers won the Oscar for best adaptation, but the movie quite faithfully follows what McCarthy had written.