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An American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road.

His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses, he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God have also been adapted as motion pictures.

Blood Meridian was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.

Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying".

In 2010, The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years.


McCarthy is known for his sparse use of punctuation.  McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons.  He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks".  Erik Hage notes that McCarthy's dialogue also often lacks attribution, but that "[s]omehow...the reader remains oriented as to who is speaking". McCarthy's attitude to punctuation dates to some editing work he did for a professor of English while he was enrolled at the University of Tennessee when he stripped out much of the punctuation in the book being edited, which pleased the professor.



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