![]() By the end of the year, however, it had rated the highest number of commendations in the literary critics’ ‘best fiction of the year’ lists. In this country, the book was virtually ignored on its publication in February 1993. For a period immediately after the publication of the paperback in America, McCarthy was being outsold only by John Grisham and Michael Crichton. ![]() Saul Bellow, who sat on the panel that in 1981 awarded McCarthy a MacArthur Fellowship – the so-called ‘genius grant’ – in recognition of his work, rhapsodised about his ‘absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.’.Īll the Pretty Horses, the first part of what McCarthy calls the Border Trilogy, went on to sell almost 200,000 copies in hardback, and to win the National Book Award for fiction. McCarthy has been described as being in the great tradition of Faulkner, Melville and Hemingway. When All the Pretty Horses appeared in America, among those few literary critics and academics who knew of McCarthy, the superlatives gushed like a fountain. But until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, not one of his books had sold out its first printing in America, and only three had been published in Britain at all. In the past 30 years, McCarthy has written six novels. If this is one of the greatest American novels of the past 20 years, which it unquestionably is, and if Cormac McCarthy, who wrote it, is one of the greatest living American authors, then why have so few people heard of him? It is a book that makes you feel glad to be alive, and which raises one nagging, insistent question. And by the end of it all, when John Grady, true to Western myth, goes riding into the sunset, it is as if a part of you is riding off too, so that all you want to do is turn back to the beginning and start all over again, because you don’t want the adventure ever to end.īooks as good as All the Pretty Horses, which turn you inside out and take you somewhere you’ve never been before, happen along every 20 years 10 if you're lucky. This piece first ran in the Telegraph Magazine on 16 April 1994, and has been republished following the release of Cormac McCarthy's latest novel, The PassengerĮven before John Grady Cole and his partner Stacey Rawlins have crossed the border into Mexico you are riding by their side, the Texan sun warming your brow, the promise of adventure surging in your veins. ![]()
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