ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters I have attempted to sketch the literary, geographical, historical and personal context within which Cormac McCarthy has worked. I have portrayed him as a southern writer, concerned with that most southern of themes, the relationship between past and present. At the same time I have suggested that his childhood environment, the Appalachian region of East Tennessee and the urban environs of 50’s Knoxville, have given him a perspective that differs from that of other southern writers such as Welty and Faulkner. I suggest that he uses the southern gothic style to express a unique vision of the woods, mountains and creeks of Sevier County and the stews of urban Knoxville rather than racially divided Mississippi, demoralized sharecropper Georgia or sensual, sophisticated New Orleans. In so doing McCarthy brings within the purview of contemporary literature the “old, weird America,” that previously expressed itself solely in the almost lost folk music that Harry Smith helped to preserve. It is only when McCarthy’s personal and cultural journey takes him to the borderlands of the Southwest that he writes of a people and a territory already made familiar-by the western and crime genres of the popular novel and the Hollywood movie.
