Bobby and his sister Alicia are the progeny of one of the members of the Manhattan Project and thus carry with them the haunting memories and guilt and fear of the great 20th-century atrocities of the Second World War.īobby and Alicia have Jewish ancestry, but one of their grandmothers is a devout Tennessee Christian. “The Passenger” tells the story of Bobby Western, a mathematics prodigy turned race car driver turned salvage diver eventually turned recluse. However, after “The Road,” which was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, McCarthy largely remained silent during the Obama and Trump eras, spending his days at the Sante Fe Institute, a scientific research center. It was not until the fall of 2022 that McCarthy released two novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” which appear to be McCarthy’s last will and testament of his life and beliefs and feel like a moratorium on the 20th century. Finally, McCarthy gained further fame for his deeply moving 2006 book “The Road,” which was made into a 2009 film that seemingly perfectly coincided with the rise of prepping, libertarianism, and doomsday culture after the 2008 economic downturn.

In the 21st century, McCarthy was able to emerge as a global “star” when his 2005 novel “No Country for Old Men” was made into an Academy Award-winning film directed by the Coen Brothers and starring Javier Bardem as the terrifying Anton Chigurh. However, during the 1990s, he became a “popular” author with his “Border Trilogy” - “All the Pretty Horses” (1992), “The Crossing” (1994), and “Cities of Plain” (1998) - which was made famous by the 2000 film version of “All the Pretty Horses,” starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. There is still Bloom’s favorite, “Blood Meridian,” a story of the struggle among Americans, Mexicans, and native peoples for control of the Southwest. Bloom, although clearly choosing personal favorites, was noted for his lack of political correctness or bias in his judgments, being one of the last great American readers of literature for literature’s sake.Ī lot of time has passed since the Clinton-era “Western Canon,” and McCarthy has become known as a much more versatile writer than simply the author of “Blood Meridian.” Today, McCarthy is essentially known for four major works.

Throughout the rest of his career, in a variety of writings, including the posthumous “The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon” (2019), Bloom would heap praise on McCarthy as being one of the greatest living American writers.

The western canon harold bloom list