Cormac McCarthy
American · 1933–2023
Cormac McCarthy was an American novelist whose bleak, violent, and visionary fiction explored the extremes of human experience. His major works include Blood Meridian, the Border Trilogy, The Road, and No Country for Old Men. Often grouped with Melville and Faulkner — sorry, Faulkner is not in the collection — McCarthy combined biblical cadence with a Gnostic-tinged metaphysics of violence and won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road in 2007.
Books
- Blood Meridian (1985)
Episodes
- 58. Moby Dick finale: Ahab Derangement Syndrome
- 56. Moby Dick, part 2: A conceptual analysis of Whiteness
- 55. Moby Dick, part 1: My name is Ishmael and my special interest is whales
- 53. DYEL wrapped: Most beloved and hated books of 2025
- 49. C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: the original stemcels vs shape rotators beef
- 48. Butcher's Crossing: John Williams's rougher cut
- 37. The Odyssey, part 2: Failsons and deadbeat dads
- 34. Blood Meridian, part 2: It's time for some game theory
- 33. Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, part 1: A legion of horribles
- 4. John Williams' sleeper hit Stoner: Finding perfection in mediocrity
Fleeting mentions
- 63. American Pastoral, part 1: Baby's First Lit Fic
- 54. Crashing out of Gravity's Rainbow: A postmortem of our first DNF
- 47. Borges's Library of Babel: Ctrl + F for meaning
- 42. Everything is Illuminated: Cultural Learnings of Trachimbrod for Make Benefit Glorious Book Club
- 39. Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed: Real anarchy has never been tried
- 36. Emily Wilson's The Odyssey, part 1: Bronze age perversion
- 32. DYEL Christmas party: The most beloved and hated books of 2024
- 31. The Moviegoer: In which we escape a deep existential malaise
- 30. Banned books: Vladimir Nabokov's infamous Lolita
- 24. Crime and Punishment, part 2: Three extraordinary men