Cormac McCarthy has been considered a strong new talent in American fiction since his first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), was awarded the 1965 William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel by an American. With the exception of Outer Dark (1968), all of McCarthy's novels are set in his native eastern Tennessee, either in the mountain communities of the Smokies or in Knoxville. Reviewers have often placed him in the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor, as his novels have in common with theirs a rustic and sometimes dark humor, intense characters, and violent plots; McCarthy shares as well their development of universal themes within a highly particularized fictional world, their seriousness of vision, and their vigorous exploitation of the English language.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy moved with his parents to Knoxville, Tennessee, at the age of four. His parents, Charles Joseph...