Awards
1992 Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Synopses & Reviews
Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
Review:
"Massively promoted and publicized as his breakthrough book, Cormac McCarthy's sixth novel is more reader-friendly than any of the previous five, being sequentially plotted and possessing somewhat sympathetic characters, but, remarkably, without any diminution of McCarthy's flinty integrity nor any noticeable softening of his harsh world view. Starting with a MacArthur 'genius' grant a few years back, McCarthy's rank in the literary stockmarket has been steadily ascendant. This story of the adventures in Texas and Mexico, set in 1949, by 16-year-old John Grady Cole, a genuinely memorable protagonist, is wonderfully written and realized. The Cormac McCarthy cult, including a significant number of English professors, will be surprised, though not disappointed by the new accessibility. And
All the Pretty Horses should earn him a lot of new readers. A good place to discover McCarthy if you haven't already." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss,
Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review:
About the Author
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, the last three 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), and
All the Pretty Horses, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for fiction in 1992.
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