In 2009, Cormac McCarthy won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the PEN American Center. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best English-language books published between 19, and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He has written twelve novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres and has also written plays and screenplays. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.Ĭormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. They have nothing just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-and each other. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind.

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.Ī father and his son walk alone through burned America.

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