Cormac McCarthy, is the Knoxville native whose literary career focused on his native East Tennessee before he moved to El Paso and then New Mexico and began setting his works in the West. He has won most prestigious literary prizes and has as high a profile as any American novelist both in this country and abroad. Rick Wallach, an independent scholar who has played a key role in the Cormac McCarthy Society for years, sums up this important study: “Daniel King has performed a service long overdue for scholars and avid readers of McCarthy’s works. Incorporating correspondence to and from his editors and agents, and relating comments he penciled into the margins of his in-progress manuscripts, King has given us a finely detailed portrait of the craftsman at work. It’s an enjoyable account of how McCarthy revised reconsidered, and ultimately built the novels which so challenge and delight us.” Six of the seven chapters focus on a particular novel. King lives and teaches in Britain.
Knoxville, The University of Tennessee Press, 2016. 232 pages, with an index, bibliography, and notes. Hardback with pictorial cover