Cormac McCarthy was born the third of six children in Rhode Island. Raised Catholic, he studied liberal arts at the University of Tennessee for a few years before joining the U.S. Air Force. 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. 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. McCarthy was awarded a Macarthur “Genius” grant in 1981. In 1985, he published
Blood Meridian, the first of his so-called “westerns,” followed by
Suttree. 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 1999, McCarthy married for a third time to Jennifer Winkley, and they now live in Tesque, New Mexico, with their one child, John Francis.
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. McCarthy is notoriously private and has given few interviews over his long career.