Cormac McCarthy Books In Order

Publication Order of The Border Trilogy Books

Publication Order of The Passenger Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Standalone Plays

Publication Order of Graphic Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Cormac McCarthy was an American author who wrote novels, plays, screenplays, and short stories.

Born July 20, 1933 with the name Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., the author would pass away June 13, 2023. He is seen as one of the great American novelists and is known for works that had frequent graphic violence and a style of writing that is characterized as using punctuation sparsely.

The author was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up mostly in Tennessee. He enrolled in the University of Tennessee in 1951 and then dropped out for the purposes of joining the United States Air Force.

His first fictional novel was released in 1965. It is titled The Orchard Keeper. He was then awarded literary grants which allowed him the opportunity to make his way to southern Europe to write Outer Dark, his second novel.

He would also go to the Southwest thanks to a MacArthur Fellowship and research and write Blood Meridian, his fifth novel. The book met with a lukewarm reception and start but has since been seen as having been a magnum opus by the author, some even giving it that prized and elusive moniker of the Great American Novel.

His book All the Pretty Horses in 1992 would bring him success, and earned him the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by other books that received varying reviews, including No Country for Old Men. However, his novel The Road was released in 2006 and received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.

Plenty of his works have been adapted into feature length films. These include No Country for Old Men, which won four Academy Awards and Best Picture. Other works adapted are All the Pretty Horses, The Road, Child of God, Outer Dark (a fifteen minute video short), and one of his plays into The Sunset Limited.

He has worked with the multidisciplinary research center the Santa Fe Institute. In 2012 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. His last novels came out in 2022, titled The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Cormac was born one of six children to his parents Gladys and Charles. The Irish-Catholic family started out in Rhode Island before moving to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1937. His father was a lawyer there working for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

He would go to St. Mary’s Parochial School and then Knoxville Catholic High School. He would then study liberal arts at the University of Tennessee. He started being interested in writing after a professor requested that he attend to some eighteenth-century essays to repunctuate them to be included in a textbook. He would leave college for the Air Force and read voraciously while he was stationed in Alaska for the first time. He would then go back to university in 1957, majoring in English and having two of his stories published under the pen name C.J. McCarthy, Junior. He won the Ingram-Merill Award for creative writing for these stories. He would drop out of college in 1959 to leave for Chicago.

When it comes to his career, he changed his name from Charles to Cormac so that he would not be confused with a famous ventriloquist’s dummy. Cormac was an Irish family nickname his father had given to him by his aunts, while others assert it’s an homage to the constructor of the Blarney Castle, Cormac MacCarthy.

McCarthy got married to Lee Holleman in 1961 and they moved to a Smoky Mountains shack outside of Knoxville. They had a son Cullen in 1962. Lee would eventually move to Wyoming and then filed for divorce.

His first novel would then be published in 1965, The Orchard Keeper. Random House released the work and his writing was compared to Faulkner, indeed winning him the William Faulkner Foundation Award in the category of notable first novel.

He would ship out hoping to visit Ireland in 1965 on a Traveling Fellowship Award that he received from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He would meet Anne DeLisle, an Englishwoman, and they got married in England the next year. That same year he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant which allowed him to travel southern Europe and then land in Ibiza to write Outer Dark, his second novel, before going back to America.

The couple would buy a dairy barn and then live in Tennessee in poverty. They then separated in 1967 and the author moved to El Paso, Texas. Richard Pearce asked him to write the screenplay for a Visions episode for television. It would be “The Gardener’s Son” and the episode was nominated for two Primetime Emmy awards.

The author would receive the MacArthur Fellowship in 1981 which let him research and write Blood Meridian. He also appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 for an episode after the novel was picked as a 2007 selection for her book club, with the interview taking place in a Santa Fe Institute library.

He has written all of his correspondence and his fiction on an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter, which was sold for $254,500 after being auctioned in 2009 by Christie’s, with proceeds going to the Santa Fe Institute. He has chosen to write on a full time basis without working other jobs so that he could support his career. He was described as having an incredible work ethic and preferred to work on many different projects at the same time.

The author married his third wife and moved with Jennifer Winkley to New Mexico with their son before getting divorced in 2006. He preferred socializing with scientists to writers. He passed away at the age of 89 at home. His personal papers are preserved in the McCarthy Papers, 98 boxes preserved at Texas State University in the Wittliff Collections. He also received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award of lifetime achievement in 2009.

All The Pretty Horses is the New York Times bestselling novel from Cormac McCarthy. It is the first in the Border Trilogy.

It is the story of John Grady Cole, a teen and the last in a line of Texas ranchers. He has nothing to stick around for, and desolate and beautiful Mexico is calling to him. He rides towards an adventure with his neighbor Rawlins and scruffy boy on an adventure that may be more dangerous than he thinks. Read this book to find out what happens and then watch the adaption!

The Crossing is the second book in the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy. Billy and Boyd Parham are boys in the years that take place before the Second World War, before events that are about to occur they could not imagine.

First is a trespassing Indian. Billy ends up going on a journey into the souls of animals, men, and boys alike. When he comes back, he finds everything has changed while he was gone except for his younger brother Boyd.

Together they go out to get back what is theirs. Instead they find more than they could have ever bargained for. One brother will find destiny, and one will find fate. Read The Crossing to absorb this book in full!