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Summary
Summary
An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridianbrilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the " wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Summary
The "masterpiece" (Michael Herr) of the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road, No Country for Old Men, The Passenger, and Stella Maris
"Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable."--Harold Bloom, from his Introduction
"McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly--envied."--Ralph Ellison
One of The Atlantic 's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Widely considered one of the finest novels by a living writer, Blood Meridian is an epic tale of the violence and corruption that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "Wild West." Its wounded hero, the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean, must confront the extraordinary brutality of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians. Seeming to preside over this nightmarish world is the diabolical Judge Holden, one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction.
Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian represents a genius vision of the historical West, one whose stature has only grown in the years since its publication.
Author Notes
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He attended the University of Tennessee, but interrupted his studies for four years to join the U.S. Air Force. He died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., on June 13, 2023. He was 89.
His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. His other works include Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian. All the Pretty Horses, the first part of the Border Trilogy, which also includes The Crossing and Cities of the Plains, won the National Book Award in 1992. His novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into a film in 2007. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road. He has also written plays and screenplays.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He attended the University of Tennessee, but interrupted his studies for four years to join the U.S. Air Force. He died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., on June 13, 2023. He was 89.
His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965. His other works include Outer Dark, Child of God, Suttree, and Blood Meridian. All the Pretty Horses, the first part of the Border Trilogy, which also includes The Crossing and Cities of the Plains, won the National Book Award in 1992. His novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into a film in 2007. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road. He has also written plays and screenplays.
(Bowker Author Biography)
The novels of the American writer Cormac McCarthy have received a number of literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men-- the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture . He died in 2023.
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
Virtually all of McCarthy's idiosyncratic fiction (The Orchard Keeper, Child-of God, Suttree) is suffused with fierce pessimism, relentlessly illustrating the feral destiny of mankind; and this new novel is no exception--though it is equally committed to a large allegorical structure, one that yanks its larger-than-life figures across a sere historical stage. ""The kid""--a Tennessee teenager--wanders aimlessly into the Texas Indian wars of the 1850s. First he's taken on by a wandering troop of ex-American soldiers, planning its own raid into Mexico. Then, after thoroughgoing slaughter of the troops by the Indians, the kid survives to be recruited as a scalp-hunter in a band of Mexican-financed marauders--led by a madman named Glanton, along with his associate: The Judge, a hairless God-or-devil figure who is capable of great ingenuity (when the men run out of gunpowder, The Judge alchemizes a new batch) but who also indulges in eccentric sermons to explain his bloodthirsty brand of philosophy. (""If God meant to intrude in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?. . . The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his days."") McCarthy, even more than in previous novels, strains for prophetic, Bible-like tones here--with a cast of allegorical types (a judge, a fool, an ex-priest, the kid) and an archaic vocabulary that lurches from ""kerfs"" and ""bedight"" to ""rimpled"" and ""thrapple."" But, though there's something stubbornly impressive about McCarthy's unwavering gloom, the novel's unceasing slaughter sometimes suggests a spaghetti-western without a hero, all gore and blazing sun--while its stentorian, pretentious prose will quickly dissuade most readers from attempting to share McCarthy's dark vision. (""He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and,"" etc.). Grandiose, feverish, opaque. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The violent, somberly horrifying tale of a dispossessed young man and the band of bloodthirsty mercenaries he joins up with in mid-nineteenth century Mexico. McCarthy's idiosyncratic prose evokes the richly imagistic language of the Old Testament and the long, rhythmic fluidity of Homeric poetry.
Kirkus Review
Virtually all of McCarthy's idiosyncratic fiction (The Orchard Keeper, Child-of God, Suttree) is suffused with fierce pessimism, relentlessly illustrating the feral destiny of mankind; and this new novel is no exception--though it is equally committed to a large allegorical structure, one that yanks its larger-than-life figures across a sere historical stage. ""The kid""--a Tennessee teenager--wanders aimlessly into the Texas Indian wars of the 1850s. First he's taken on by a wandering troop of ex-American soldiers, planning its own raid into Mexico. Then, after thoroughgoing slaughter of the troops by the Indians, the kid survives to be recruited as a scalp-hunter in a band of Mexican-financed marauders--led by a madman named Glanton, along with his associate: The Judge, a hairless God-or-devil figure who is capable of great ingenuity (when the men run out of gunpowder, The Judge alchemizes a new batch) but who also indulges in eccentric sermons to explain his bloodthirsty brand of philosophy. (""If God meant to intrude in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?. . . The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his days."") McCarthy, even more than in previous novels, strains for prophetic, Bible-like tones here--with a cast of allegorical types (a judge, a fool, an ex-priest, the kid) and an archaic vocabulary that lurches from ""kerfs"" and ""bedight"" to ""rimpled"" and ""thrapple."" But, though there's something stubbornly impressive about McCarthy's unwavering gloom, the novel's unceasing slaughter sometimes suggests a spaghetti-western without a hero, all gore and blazing sun--while its stentorian, pretentious prose will quickly dissuade most readers from attempting to share McCarthy's dark vision. (""He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and,"" etc.). Grandiose, feverish, opaque. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The violent, somberly horrifying tale of a dispossessed young man and the band of bloodthirsty mercenaries he joins up with in mid-nineteenth century Mexico. McCarthy's idiosyncratic prose evokes the richly imagistic language of the Old Testament and the long, rhythmic fluidity of Homeric poetry.