Synopses & Reviews
With a thirteen major works over a fifty-year career, one that includes a 2007 Pulitzer Prize, selection for Oprahs Book Club, and Oscar-winning film adaptations of his novels, Cormac McCarthy is one of Americas best-selling novelists of the South and Southwest. Cormac McCarthy offers a shrewd chapter-by-chapter reading, exploring concepts such as the Southern Gothic novel, the Southwest border, faith and suicide, and father-son relationships. Respected scholar Kenneth Lincoln shows how McCarthys canticles of praise, grief, and warning mix classic, biblical, and ballad genres and cross the lyrical with the narrative. Lincoln makes a compelling case that McCarthy is our greatest millennial novelist in a time of heroic challenge and high global stakes.
Review
“With tremendous narrative drive, unpretentious grace, and a thorough grasp of McCarthys themes, Kenneth Lincoln invites the reader into McCarthys astonishingly creative and dramatic writing. Lincolns timely study covers writing hybrids of mytho-poetic saga and red-dirt realism for our age. McCarthys wise, dubious, existential edge reflects on the deepest American themes of regeneration through violence, particularly the roles of men in the creation of our inescapable national identity. His stories ask readers whether a country so created out of blood and greed can ever redeem itself. Lincoln limns the writers deepest probings with enthusiastic invitations, excellent plot summaries, and thoughtful provocations. Cormac McCarthy allows students and general readers to ask the essential question: Can we survive our own culture of blood and violence?”—Peter Nabokov, Dept. of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA"Bringing together narrative power and a poetic style, Lincoln offers a significant treatment of one of the US's most prolific and prominent writers. While maintaining the idea of hyperrealism as defined by Jean Baudrillard and others, the author demonstrates that McCarthy's subject matter may be closer to the truth of human nature and psychology than readers may like to consider . . . This book provides a full description of the elements that again and again bring readers back to McCarthy's canon. McCarthy enthusiasts and anyone interested in writing about the American West will welcome this resource."--Choice
Synopsis
This book is a guide to Cormac McCarthy's canon from The Road to All the Pretty Horses, delving into the dominant themes in his work, his influences from Faulkner to Dante, and the current cultural debates his books have figured into.
About the Author
Kenneth Lincoln is Professor of Contemporary Literature, UCLA. Beginning with Native American Renaissance, The Good Red Road, and Indin Humor, he has published many books in American Indian Studies, chaired the countrys first interdisciplinary Masters Program in the field, and written novels, poetry, and personal essays about Western Americana. His latest books are White Boyz Blues: A Memoir and Speak Like Singing: Classics of Native American Literature.
Table of Contents
Penetrant and Simple * Western Storykeeper * Canticles Down West * Back to Appalachia * Dark is a Way * Child of Whose God? * Southern Milltown Script * Awakening Frontier Muses * Go Bloody West * Theater Grotessco * Vacquero, Ride On * Star-Crossed Cowboy * Horse Sense and Human Fate * A Sorry Tale * Live or Die, Brother? * The Final Story