Named by Harold Bloom as one of the four great American novelists of his time (alongside Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo), Cormac McCarthy published twelve novels over the course of his lifetime, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western and post-apocalyptic genres. Economic in style, his fiction was dark and often violent, featuring characters who, like him, lived on the fringes of society. In an interview with The New Yorker, McCarthy made the memorable statement: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed…” noting that the novelist’s proper occupation must be with death.

Set in the Appalachian south, his first four novels The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree took much from Faulkner, especially in their “use of dialect and concrete sense of the world” and earned him a MacArthur Fellowship which enabled him to travel to the American Southwest, where he researched and wrote his fifth novel, Blood Meridian. McCarthy’s later novels were met with widespread commercial success and many were adapted into popular feature films, notably his classic western All The Pretty Horses, 2005 drama No Country For Old Men, and postapocalyptic epic The Road which won McCarthy the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

First edition of The Orchard Keeper; signed by Cormac McCarthy

Published in 1965, Cormac McCarthy’s debut novel The Orchard Keeper tells the story of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. Set in a remote town in rural Tennessee, the novel was praised for its magnificent evocation of the American landscape.

“With the ‘long purple welts of the Great Smokies’ in the distance, the more immediate vista is narrowed to the pine woods and limestone quarries, the local bar and the general store, and since the time is the ’30’s, the men and the boys make a scratchy living, hunting and fishing, brewing and running whiskey… Mr. McCarthy’s novel, while desolate, is effective in many ways; there is some unusual writing furrowed by a stark, visual imagery while the story itself has a shadowed fascination” (Kirkus Reviews).

First edition of McCarthy’s second novel Outer Dark; signed by him

Published in 1968, McCarthy’s second novel, Outer Dark was described by Time as “a profound parable that ultimately speaks to any society in any time.” Set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century, it tells the story of a woman who bears the child of her brother who, in turn, leaves the nameless infant in the woods to die, but tells his sister that the newborn died of natural causes and had to be buried. When the woman discovers her brother’s lie, she sets out on an eerie, apocalyptic journey to find her son.

First edition of Child of God; signed by Cormac McCarthy

Published in 1973, Child of God tells the story of a violent young outcast and serial killer in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee. In the taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard–a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape–haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. In 2013 it was adapted into a film of the same name directed by James Franco starring Scott Haze and Jim Parrack.

First edition of Suttree; signed by Cormac McCarthy

Suttree (1979) was the fourth of McCarthy’s novels to be published, although he began writing it it well before his first, The Orchard Keeper. One of McCarthy’s most semiautobiographical works, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River. With it’s fragmented structure, many flashbacks and abrupt shifts in grammatical person, it has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Jerome Charyn described it as “a doomed Huckleberry Finn” and The Times Literary Supplement praised the work as “Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor.”

First edition of Blood Meridian; inscribed by Cormac McCarthy to close friend John Sheddan

Widely considered McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian was the product of McCarthy’s 1981 MacArthur Fellows grant. It was his first attempt at a western and his first novel set in the Southwestern United States, a change from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work. Set in the American frontier with a loose historical context, the narrative follows a fictional teenager from Tennessee referred to as “the kid”, with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Indigenous Americans and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, sadistic pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit.

“Blood Meridian seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant even in 2000 than it was fifteen years ago. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian” (Harold Bloom).

First editions of each title in McCarthy’s acclaimed Border Trilogy; each volume signed by him and dust jacket illustrator Chip Kidd

Published between 1992 and 1998, Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning and best-selling trio of novels, The Border Trilogy, constitutes a genuine American epic. The young men in these novels come of age on Southwestern ranches in the 1930’s, while across the border, Mexico beckons them with its desolate beauty and the cruel promise of a place where dreams are paid for in blood. The San Francisco Chronicle called the trilogy “An American classic to stand with the finest literary achievements of the century” and the Chicago Tribune exclaimed, “Make a place on your bookshelf… If you love classic narrative, quest stories, adventure stories of high order transformed by one of the lapidary masters of contemporary American fiction, now is your hour of triumph.”

First edition of No Country For Old Men; signed by Cormac McCarthy and dust jacket designer Chip Kidd

Described by The New York Times as “a harrowing, propulsive drama about a stone-cold killer, a small-town sheriff, and an average Joe…” No Country For Old Men occurs in the vicinity of the Mexico–United States border in 1980 and concerns an illegal drug deal gone awry in the Texas desert back country. The novel received significant critical attention and was described by the Houston Chronicle as “a heated story that brands the reader’s mind as if seared by a knife heated upon campfire flames.” It was adapted into the 2007 Coen brothers film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road; signed by him, Viggo Mortensen and dust jacket designer Chip Kidd

Published in 2006, McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The Road details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and almost all life. The New York Times described it as a novel of “stunning, savage beauty… written with stripped-down urgency and fueled by the force of a universal nightmare. This is an exquisitely bleak incantation—pure poetic brimstone.”

First editions of McCarthy’s two-volume masterpiece: The Passenger and Stella Maris; singed by him and dust jacket designer Chip Kidd

Published in 2022, The Passenger was released one month before its companion novel Stella Maris. Both novels follow the story of Bobby and Alicia Western, two siblings whose father developed the atomic bomb. His first novel since The Road sixteen years prior, McCarthy first began writing The Passenger in the 1970s, working on it intermittently over the following decades. “In the new pair of novels…a fresh space is made to enable the exchange of ideas, and the rhetorical consequences are felt in the very textures of the fiction….[McCarthy’s] ear for dialogue has always been impeccable; in these novels…people think and speak rationally, mundanely, intelligently, crazily, as they do in real life…And along with the excellent dialogue there are scores of lovely noticings, often of the natural world….Authoritatively eloquent” (James Wood, The New Yorker).

First edition of The Stonemason; signed by Cormac McCarthy and dust jacket designer Chip Kidd

In addition to the first editions featured above, our collection also currently includes the first edition of McCarthy’s play The Stonemason featured above. Browse all of the Cormac McCarthy titles currently in our collection here.