Reading List

Authors Like Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy published twelve novels in fifty-seven years and spent most of that time refusing to explain any of them. Blood Meridian (1985) follows a fourteen-year-old runaway into a scalp-hunting expedition along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s, built from historical record and written in a register borrowed from the King James Bible; it is regularly named the greatest American novel of the past century and is close to unreadable for a good many people who try it. All the Pretty Horses (1992) won the National Book Award and sold in numbers the earlier books never approached. No Country for Old Men (2005) became the Coen brothers' film and took four Academy Awards. The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize. He published nothing for sixteen years and then two linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, in late 2022; he died in June 2023, aged eighty-nine. In November 2024, seventeen months after his death, Vanity Fair published an interview with Augusta Britt, who said their relationship began in 1976 when she was sixteen and he was forty-two. Anyone recommending him now has to decide what to do with that, and this page does not skip it. The ten below are chosen on the prose, the violence and the country.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · The American West · Pulitzer Prize 2007 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Cormac McCarthy, the closest ancestors are William Faulkner, whose sentences and unpunctuated interior voice he took and hardened, and Herman Melville, whose Moby-Dick is the structural model for Blood Meridian. For living writers, Denis Johnson is the nearest on sentence and violence, Annie Proulx and Ron Rash on landscape, and Philipp Meyer on the Texas century. Juan Rulfo is the Mexican novel his border books are haunted by. And Louise Erdrich writes the same country with the people Blood Meridian mostly kills.

Every book by Cormac McCarthy →

10 authors like Cormac McCarthy

01
Older than the genre · The source

William Faulkner

American · As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Faulkner invented Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and wrote fifteen novels set in it, in long unpunctuated sentences that move between minds without warning. As I Lay Dying gives fifteen narrators a single journey to bury a mother; Absalom, Absalom! assembles a plantation dynasty out of contradictory retellings. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and two Pulitzers, and died in 1962.

The direct source, and McCarthy never pretended otherwise — the early Tennessee novels are so close that reviewers said so from the start. The long biblical sentences, the missing quotation marks, the violence treated as landscape and the South as a place with a curse on it are all here first. Faulkner is the more psychologically curious writer; McCarthy stripped out the interiority and kept the weather. Read As I Lay Dying, which is short.

— Lisanne

Every book by William Faulkner →

02
Older than the genre · The model for Blood Meridian

Herman Melville

American · Moby-Dick (1851), Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)

Moby-Dick is a whaling voyage, an encyclopaedia of the industry and a metaphysical argument, narrated by a young man who signs on with a captain pursuing an animal for reasons nobody aboard can talk him out of. It sold poorly, Melville died in 1891 largely forgotten, and the book was rediscovered in the 1920s. It is now generally treated as the central American novel.

The structural template for Blood Meridian, and the comparison serious McCarthy critics make first: an aimless boy attaches himself to a company led by a figure of enormous rhetorical power and appetite, and the book becomes an argument about whether that figure is right about the universe. Judge Holden is Ahab with the metaphysics inverted. If you want to understand what McCarthy was attempting, read Melville.

— Lisanne
03
The nearest on the sentence

Denis Johnson

American · Jesus' Son (1992), Tree of Smoke (2007), Train Dreams (2011)

Jesus' Son is eleven linked stories narrated by an addict whose grip on chronology is unreliable and whose sentences keep arriving at unexpected beauty. Tree of Smoke, a long novel about American intelligence work in Vietnam, won the National Book Award in 2007. Train Dreams is a hundred-odd pages about a day labourer in the early twentieth-century American West and is the most McCarthy-like thing he wrote. He died in 2017.

The closest living match while he lived, and Train Dreams is the book to hand a McCarthy reader: the same short declarative violence, the same landscape that outlasts everybody in it, the same refusal to explain a man to you. Johnson is funnier, stranger and more forgiving, and he lets grace into the frame in a way McCarthy almost never does. Read Train Dreams in an evening, then Jesus' Son.

— Lisanne
04
The landscape, and what it does to people

Annie Proulx

American · The Shipping News (1993), Close Range (1999), Barkskins (2016)

The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Close Range collects the Wyoming stories, including “Brokeback Mountain”, which Ang Lee filmed in 2005. Barkskins follows three hundred years of deforestation across North America through two families. Proulx writes rural work — ranching, logging, fishing — with the equipment and the injuries included, and did much of her research on the ground in her sixties and seventies.

The other great living writer of the hard American landscape, and a useful corrective on one point. Both write country that kills people casually and neither offers consolation, but Proulx keeps the economics visible: her characters are ruined by cattle prices and absent employers as much as by weather. She also writes women as full participants, which McCarthy very largely does not. Read the Wyoming stories.

— Lisanne
05
The other great western

Larry McMurtry

American · The Last Picture Show (1966), Lonesome Dove (1985)

Lonesome Dove follows two ageing Texas Rangers driving cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986; the 1989 miniseries is among the most watched American television dramas ever made. McMurtry also wrote The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, ran an antiquarian bookshop in Archer City, Texas, and shared the Academy Award for the Brokeback Mountain screenplay. He died in 2021.

The same year as Blood Meridian, the same country, the opposite temperament. McMurtry gives you friendship, comedy and a cattle drive you can follow; McCarthy gives you a scalp-hunting expedition and a judge who argues that war is the truest form of divination. Reading them together is the fastest way to see how much of a western is a choice about what to look at. Start with Lonesome Dove if Blood Meridian defeated you.

— Lisanne

Every book by Larry McMurtry →

Authors like Larry McMurtry →

06
The Mexican novel underneath the border trilogy

Juan Rulfo

Mexican · El Llano en llamas (1953), Pedro Páramo (1955)

Pedro Páramo is about a hundred and twenty pages long. A man goes to the village of Comala to find the father he has never met, and gradually the reader works out that everyone he is speaking to is dead. Rulfo published almost nothing else, worked for a tyre company and then for the national indigenous institute, and died in 1986. Gabriel García Márquez said the book changed what he thought a novel could do; Netflix filmed it in 2024.

The Mexico that McCarthy's border novels keep crossing into, written from the inside. In All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, Mexico functions largely as a place where American boys are tested and undone; Rulfo writes it as a country with its own dead, its own land disputes and its own century. He is also the answer to anyone who thinks the dreamlike stretches of McCarthy came out of nowhere.

— Lisanne
Every book by Juan Rulfo →
07
The Texas century, at length

Philipp Meyer

American · American Rust (2009), The Son (2013)

The Son runs from a Comanche raid in 1849 to a family oil fortune in the present, through three generations of the McCulloughs: a boy taken captive and raised Comanche, his son, and his great-granddaughter running the company. It was a Pulitzer finalist and became an AMC series with Pierce Brosnan in 2017. Meyer learned to track, hunt and butcher for the research, and the book is unsentimental about how the land changed hands.

The most direct inheritance in contemporary American fiction, and the closest thing to a companion volume for the border trilogy. Meyer covers the same country over the same period and does something McCarthy declines to do: he shows the transfer of land and money as a continuous process with beneficiaries, rather than as fate. Read The Son after All the Pretty Horses.

— Lisanne
Every book by Philipp Meyer →
08
Appalachia, at the same temperature

Ron Rash

American · Serena (2008), Above the Waterfall (2015)

Serena is set in a Depression-era North Carolina logging camp, where a timber baron's new wife turns out to be a good deal more ruthless than he is, and the mountains are being stripped as the national park is being argued over. It was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and was filmed in 2014 with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. Rash is a poet as well as a novelist and has spent his career in the southern Appalachians.

The nearest match for the early McCarthy, the Tennessee novels most readers skip. Same mountains, same poverty, same violence arriving without warning in a landscape indifferent to it, and prose with the same compression. Rash is the more accessible writer and gives you a plot to hold. If Child of God or Suttree is the McCarthy you rate, this is the shelf to move to.

— Lisanne
Every book by Ron Rash →
09
The same violence, different bodies

Jesmyn Ward

American · Salvage the Bones (2011), Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Let Us Descend (2023)

Ward has won the National Book Award for fiction twice, for Salvage the Bones, set over the twelve days around Hurricane Katrina in a poor Black family on the Mississippi coast, and for Sing, Unburied, Sing, a road trip to Parchman prison accompanied by the dead. Let Us Descend follows an enslaved girl walked south to be sold. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017 and teaches at Tulane.

The American South written with the people McCarthy's books largely pass over. Ward shares the biblical register, the ghosts, the landscape that will not help anybody, and the refusal to soften a death — and her poor rural families have the interior lives that McCarthy grants almost exclusively to men on horses. If you love the prose but have started to notice who is missing from it, she is the answer rather than the rebuke.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jesmyn Ward →

10
The argument against him

Louise Erdrich

American, Turtle Mountain Chippewa · Love Medicine (1984), The Round House (2012), The Night Watchman (2020)

Erdrich has published more than thirty books set largely among Ojibwe families in North Dakota and Minnesota, following the same extended families across a century. The Round House, about a boy pursuing justice after his mother is attacked on land where jurisdiction is disputed, won the National Book Award in 2012; The Night Watchman, based on her grandfather's fight against a 1950s bill to terminate tribal status, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021. She owns a bookshop in Minneapolis.

The strongest case against Blood Meridian, and it is not squeamishness about the violence. That novel's Native people are almost entirely the killed and the killing — magnificent, terrifying, and without a single interior life among them — and the book is often praised precisely for refusing to moralise about it. Erdrich writes the same continent and the same century with those families as the subject, including the legal machinery that did most of the damage after the shooting stopped. Read The Night Watchman.

— Lisanne

Every book by Louise Erdrich →

Where to start if you loved Cormac McCarthy

If you want the source, read William Faulkner.

As I Lay Dying. Fifteen narrators, one coffin, and the sentences McCarthy took.

If Blood Meridian defeated you, read Larry McMurtry.

Lonesome Dove. The same country, the same decade, with friendship in it.

If you want the nearest sentence, read Denis Johnson.

Train Dreams. A hundred pages, one labourer, and a West that outlasts him.

If you loved the border trilogy, read Juan Rulfo.

Pedro Páramo. The Mexico underneath it, written from the inside.

If you want the argument against him, read Louise Erdrich.

The Night Watchman. The same continent, with the families as the subject.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Cormac McCarthy

Who should I read if I love Cormac McCarthy?

For the ancestors: William Faulkner for the sentences and Herman Melville for the shape of Blood Meridian. For living or recent writers: Denis Johnson is nearest on prose and violence, Annie Proulx and Ron Rash on landscape and rural work, Philipp Meyer on the Texas century at length, and Larry McMurtry for the western with warmth in it. Juan Rulfo is the Mexican novel his border books are haunted by. Jesmyn Ward writes the same South with the people he passes over, and Louise Erdrich is the argument against Blood Meridian's treatment of Native people.

What is the Augusta Britt story?

In November 2024, seventeen months after McCarthy's death, Vanity Fair published a long interview by Vincenzo Barney with Augusta Britt, who said she met McCarthy at a Tucson motel pool in 1976, when she was sixteen and he was forty-two, and that a relationship followed which continued in some form for decades. Britt, then in her sixties, described him as having kept her safe and said she does not regard herself as a victim. Under Arizona law at the time she was below the age of consent. The article was widely criticised for its admiring tone, and some details in it were disputed by researchers afterwards. Both things are true: the account is Britt's own, and the magazine's framing of it drew serious objection.

Does it change how to read the books?

That is a decision for each reader and not one a recommendation page should make for you. What can be said factually: the disclosure came after his death, McCarthy never addressed it publicly, and Britt has said she was the model for several characters. Some readers have found that it recasts the young women in the novels; others separate the work from the life as they would for Picasso or Naipaul. If you would rather not read him at all, most of what people value in his prose is available in Faulkner, Denis Johnson and Jesmyn Ward.

Which Cormac McCarthy book should I start with?

Not Blood Meridian. Start with All the Pretty Horses (1992), which has a plot, a love story and horses, and won the National Book Award; or No Country for Old Men (2005), which is the fastest and the closest to a thriller. The Road (2006) is the most emotionally direct and the one most people finish. Come to Blood Meridian third or fourth, when you know what he is doing with a sentence, and expect it to be genuinely difficult.

Why does he not use quotation marks?

He said in his only substantial television interview that there is no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks, and that if you write properly the reader will know who is speaking. Semicolons go too, and apostrophes are used sparingly. The practical effect is that speech and landscape run into each other without a seam, which is why the prose feels biblical and why some readers bounce off it in the first ten pages. Faulkner did much of it first.

What are The Passenger and Stella Maris?

Two linked novels published in October and December 2022, sixteen years after The Road and months before his death. The Passenger follows a salvage diver in 1980 whose sister has died and who is being pursued for reasons he cannot establish; Stella Maris is a transcript of that sister's conversations with a psychiatrist at a Wisconsin institution in 1972. They are heavily concerned with mathematics, physics and the limits of language, drawn from his years at the Santa Fe Institute, and they divided reviewers sharply. Read them last.

Is Blood Meridian being filmed?

It has defeated everyone who has tried, for forty years, and that is its own kind of answer. Ridley Scott, Todd Field, James Franco and others have been attached at various points and nothing has been shot and released. The obstacles are obvious: the violence is close to unfilmable at any rating, and much of what makes the book great is at the level of the sentence. The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men (2007) remains the best McCarthy adaptation, and John Hillcoat's The Road (2009) the most faithful.

What order should I read his books in?

They are not a series, with one exception: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain form the Border Trilogy and share characters, so read those three in order. Otherwise, by period: the early southern novels are The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree; then Blood Meridian; then the trilogy; then No Country for Old Men and The Road; then the two 2022 novels.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

More from the shelf

Reading list

Best Fiction Books

The novels that stay with you longest.

Reading list

Best Short Story Collections

The collections worth the time.

Author index

Books by Author

Every writer on the shelf.

Author index

Every Author Guide, A–Z

The full alphabetical directory.

From the bookshelf

“Carry the fire.”

— Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006.

If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.

Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations
Start Typing
Dummy Image

Hi, there.

Home

About

My Bookshelf

Weekly’s

Stay tuned: sign up for the newsletter!