Episode Details

Cormac McCarthy lived in poverty for decades rather than compromise his writing, gave almost no interviews in sixty years, and produced novels of such violent beauty that critics compared him to Faulkner and Melville. Blood Meridian and The Road are among the most devastating works in American literature, written by a man who chose obscurity over fame and silence over self-promotion until the world finally caught up with him.

This episode traces McCarthy from his Tennessee childhood through the decades of poverty and critical neglect, the Border Trilogy that brought him a wider audience, and the late masterpieces that secured his place as one of America's greatest novelists.

• McCarthy's early years of poverty and the Faulknerian Southern novels almost nobody read
• The move to the Southwest and Blood Meridian — the most violent and most debated novel in American literature
• The Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men, and the Coen Brothers film that brought him to mass audiences
• The Road, the Pulitzer Prize, and a career built on refusing every convention of literary celebrity