Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright whose family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee. Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, set in 1951 in Knoxville. The novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has resigned from a privileged life to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River. Suttree was written over a twenty-year span, and is a departure from McCarthy's prior novels, in length and structure and with more humor. The novel employs Knoxville landmarks, among them: Gay Street and the Gay Street Bridge, Cumberland Avenue, the Tennessee River and First Creek, and the Henley Street Bridge. McCarthy's other works span Southern Gothic, western and post-apocalyptic genres. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road, and his novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, winning four Academy Awards including Best Picture. His book All the Pretty Horses won the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Pretty Horses and The Road were also adapted as motion pictures. Cormac McCarthy has been named one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth.