Beyond the Book: Background information when reading No Country For Old Men

Beyond the Book

This article relates to No Country For Old Men

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933 and spent most of his childhood near Knoxville, Tennessee. He served in the U.S. Air Force and later studied at the University of Tennessee. In 1976 he moved to El Paso, Texas, where he lives today.

McCarthy's fiction parallels his movement from the Southeast to the West—the first four novels being set in Tennessee, and his later novels set in the Southwest and Mexico. The Orchard Keeper (1965) won the Faulkner Award for a first novel; it was followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, which completes The Border Trilogy.

No Country For Old Men is his first novel since 1998.

Filed under

This "beyond the book article" relates to No Country For Old Men. It originally ran in August 2005 and has been updated for the July 2006 paperback edition. Go to magazine.