McCarthy, Cormac (1933–) An American novelist with a distinguished reputation, he was born in Rhode Island, educated in Tennessee, and from 1976, has lived in El Paso. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), is a tale of murder and the grim lives of a community in the Great Smoky Mountains, while Outer Dark (1968) is a Gothic tale in a Southern setting, recording the wanderings of a woman searching for her son by her brother.