Author Guide · American Literature
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Cormac McCarthy typed almost everything he wrote on one portable Olivetti he bought second-hand for $50, about five million words over five decades. For most of that time almost nobody read him: by 1991 none of his novels had sold more than 5,000 copies in hardback, and he was called the best unknown novelist in America. Then came All the Pretty Horses, the Pulitzer for The Road, and an Oscar-winning film. He wrote twelve novels in all, and this guide covers every one in order, the trilogy and the pair that belong together, and where to start.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 novels · 2 plays · 1965–2022 · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Cormac McCarthy wrote twelve novels, from The Orchard Keeper (1965) to Stella Maris (2022), along with two plays, five screenplays and three short stories. His best-known books are Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Start with All the Pretty Horses or The Road; save Blood Meridian until later. He died on June 13, 2023, aged 89.
Where to Start with Cormac McCarthy
If you want the easiest way in
→ All the Pretty Horses (1992).
If you want the shortest and most devastating
→ The Road (2006).
If you have seen the film
→ No Country for Old Men (2005).
If you want his masterpiece
→ Blood Meridian (1985), but not first.
If you want the warmest, funniest McCarthy
→ Suttree (1979).
All 12 Cormac McCarthy Novels, in Order
The Orchard Keeper
Three lives in the hills of east Tennessee circle one another without ever quite meeting: a boy, a bootlegger, and an old man keeping an orchard. McCarthy finished it while working part-time in a Chicago warehouse and sent the manuscript to Random House with no agent and no introduction. It won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for a notable first novel.
Outer Dark
A woman gives birth to her brother's child; he abandons the baby in the woods and tells her it died. She sets off to find it, and he follows her, while three strangers move through the same country leaving violence behind them. McCarthy wrote it on Ibiza after a Rockefeller grant took him to southern Europe.
Child of God
Lester Ballard, dispossessed of his land and pushed to the edges of his Tennessee community, descends into murder and worse. Under 200 pages, and among the bleakest things McCarthy wrote. Harold Bloom named it one of the contemporary works he expected to last, and James Franco filmed it in 2013.
Know what you are starting: it includes necrophilia, told flatly and without comment.
— LisanneSuttree
Cornelius Suttree leaves a well-off family to live on a houseboat on the Tennessee River in 1950s Knoxville, among drunks, hustlers and the dispossessed. McCarthy worked on it for twenty years, drawing on his own Knoxville life. Funnier and warmer than the rest of his early work, and often called his most human novel.
Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
A runaway known as the kid falls in with the Glanton gang, scalp hunters working the Mexico–Texas borderlands in the 1840s, led in spirit by the vast, hairless Judge Holden. McCarthy used a MacArthur Fellowship to research the American Southwest, and The New York Times called it the bloodiest book since the Iliad. Harold Bloom called it the greatest single American novel since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and in a 2006 New York Times poll it placed third among the best American novels of the previous quarter century.
Not the place to start. Read Blood Meridian third or fourth, when you already trust him.
— LisanneAll the Pretty Horses
Sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole rides from Texas into Mexico with a friend, looking for the cowboy life that is disappearing at home, and finds horses, a girl and a Mexican prison. It won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, sold 190,000 hardbacks in six months, and made McCarthy famous at 59.
The easiest way in. Its sentences are as good as anything he wrote, and the story pulls you through.
— LisanneThe Crossing
Billy Parham traps a pregnant she-wolf on his family's New Mexico ranch and, instead of killing her, decides to take her back over the border to the mountains she came from. He crosses into Mexico three times in this book, each journey costing him more. Slower and sadder than All the Pretty Horses, with no shared characters until the final volume.
Cities of the Plain
New Mexico, 1952. John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing work on the same ranch, and John Grady falls in love with a young woman in a Juárez brothel. The two earlier books meet here, and the trilogy closes.
Read the trilogy in order. This book only works once you know both men.
— LisanneNo Country for Old Men
Llewelyn Moss finds two million dollars beside a failed drug deal in the Texas desert and takes it, pursued by the implacable killer Anton Chigurh while an ageing sheriff tries to keep up. McCarthy wrote it first as a screenplay, which is why it is so spare and so full of dialogue. The Coen brothers' 2007 film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Start here if you have seen the film: the book is leaner, and the sheriff's voice is the real subject.
— LisanneThe Road
A father and his young son push a shopping cart south through a burned America, carrying the fire and avoiding the people who would eat them. The idea came to McCarthy in an El Paso motel room while looking out at the city with his own young son, and many of the exchanges between father and boy were conversations the two of them had had. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club, which led to McCarthy's first television interview.
Start here if you want the shortest, most devastating one, and read it in as few sittings as you can.
— LisanneThe Passenger
Bobby Western, a salvage diver, dives to a sunken plane off the Mississippi coast and finds a passenger missing. What follows is less a thriller than a long meditation on physics, grief and his sister Alicia, and on their father's work on the atomic bomb. It was his first novel in sixteen years, and he had been working on it since the 1980s.
Stella Maris
A companion novel published six weeks after The Passenger, and his last. It consists entirely of transcripts of conversations between Alicia Western, a mathematical prodigy, and her psychiatrist at the hospital where she has committed herself. Alicia was his first female protagonist since Outer Dark, and McCarthy died the following June.
Read The Passenger first. On its own this is a philosophical dialogue, not a novel.
— LisanneWhich Cormac McCarthy Books Are Connected?
Most of his novels stand alone. Two groups belong together, and one book is better read alongside another.
- The Border Trilogy — All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). The first two follow different young men; the third brings them together. Read the entries →
- The Passenger and Stella Maris — published six weeks apart in 2022, following Bobby and Alicia Western, whose father worked on the atomic bomb. Read The Passenger first. Read the entries →
- Suttree and his own life — his most autobiographical novel, drawn from his years in Knoxville. Read the entry →
In What Order to Read Cormac McCarthy
You do not need to read him in order of publication, and I would not. His early Appalachian novels are the hardest, and starting there puts most readers off. The one rule: read the Border Trilogy in order, and read The Passenger before Stella Maris.
A reading path
1. All the Pretty Horses (1992) or The Road (2006)
2. No Country for Old Men (2005)
3. Blood Meridian (1985)
4. The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998)
5. Suttree (1979)
6. The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022)
In publication order
Start with The Orchard Keeper (1965) only if you like watching a writer form.
Everything Else Cormac McCarthy Wrote: Plays, Screenplays and One Essay
Beyond the twelve novels there is a small, strange body of work: two plays, two screenplays that reached print, and a single essay about where language comes from. The ones I would read first sit at the top of each form.
Open a form with the + to see every book in it.
Plays
2
2 books · 1994–2006
The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts (1994)
A Black family of stonemasons in Louisville, across four generations.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
The Sunset Limited (2006)
Two men argue about faith and despair in a New York apartment; subtitled “a novel in dramatic form” and filmed in 2011 with Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Screenplays in print
2
2 books · 1996–2013
The Gardener's Son (1996)
Written for PBS and broadcast in 1977; nominated for two Primetime Emmys.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
The Counselor: A Screenplay (2013)
His first original screenplay, filmed by Ridley Scott.
Amazon, Bookshop.org and more
Nonfiction
1
1 book · 2017
- 2017The Kekulé Probleman essay for Nautilus on the unconscious and the origin of language; his only published nonfiction
Quick facts about Cormac McCarthy
- Born
- July 20, 1933, Providence, Rhode Island, as Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr.
- Died
- June 13, 2023, Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged 89
- Grew up
- Knoxville, Tennessee
- Education
- University of Tennessee, twice, without a degree; US Air Force, 1953–1957
- Novels
- 12, from The Orchard Keeper (1965) to Stella Maris (2022)
- Also wrote
- 2 plays, 5 screenplays, 3 short stories and one essay, “The Kekulé Problem” (2017)
- Awards
- MacArthur Fellowship (1981); National Book Award (1992); Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2007)
- Wrote on
- A portable Olivetti Lettera 32, bought for $50 and used for about five million words
- Kept company with
- Scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, where he was a trustee
- Filmed
- All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road, Child of God and The Counselor
How Cormac McCarthy Wrote: No Quotation Marks, No Semicolons
McCarthy's page looks different from everyone else's. He used almost no punctuation beyond full stops and the occasional comma, never used quotation marks for speech, and called semicolons idiocy. He often left dialogue unattributed, and still you always know who is talking. In place of commas he strung clauses together with “and”, which is why his sentences can run on like scripture or like a long ride.
He researched obsessively and revised for years, but never outlined a plot; he thought of writing as a subconscious process that needed room. Often he had several books going at once, a couple of hours a day on each. He read Spanish, lived in Ibiza, El Paso and Santa Fe, and left Spanish dialogue untranslated in the Border Trilogy.
He said he only respected writers who deal with life and death, and named Moby-Dick as his favourite novel. But he preferred scientists to novelists, spent decades around the Santa Fe Institute, and copy-edited physics papers for fun. Of all his interests, he said, writing was way down at the bottom of the list.
Watch: Cormac McCarthy in conversation with David Krakauer
Frequently asked questions about Cormac McCarthy's books
How many books did Cormac McCarthy write?
Cormac McCarthy wrote twelve novels, from The Orchard Keeper (1965) to Stella Maris (2022). He also wrote two plays, The Stonemason and The Sunset Limited, five screenplays, three short stories and one essay, “The Kekulé Problem” (2017).
How many novels did Cormac McCarthy write?
Twelve. The last two, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published six weeks apart in 2022, sixteen years after The Road.
What are Cormac McCarthy's books in order?
In order of publication: The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), No Country for Old Men (2005), The Road (2006), The Passenger (2022), Stella Maris (2022).
Which Cormac McCarthy book should I read first?
All the Pretty Horses (1992) is the easiest way in: it is his most readable novel and it won the National Book Award. The Road (2006) is the shortest and the most immediately devastating. Save Blood Meridian for later.
What is the Border Trilogy?
The Border Trilogy is All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). The first two follow two young men, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, separately; the third brings them together in New Mexico in 1952. Read them in order.
Should I read The Passenger before Stella Maris?
Yes. The Passenger was published first, in October 2022, and Stella Maris followed six weeks later. They follow the same brother and sister, and Stella Maris is a series of conversations that assume you already know the story.
Is Blood Meridian McCarthy's best book?
Many critics think so. Harold Bloom called it the greatest single American novel since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and in a 2006 New York Times poll of writers it placed third among the best American novels of the previous 25 years. It is also his most violent, which is why it is a poor place to start.
Which Cormac McCarthy books were made into films?
All the Pretty Horses (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), which won four Academy Awards including Best Picture, The Road (2009) and Child of God (2013). His play The Sunset Limited was filmed in 2011, and he wrote the original screenplay for The Counselor (2013). A film of Blood Meridian, directed by John Hillcoat, has been in development.
Did Cormac McCarthy win the Nobel Prize?
No. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 for The Road and the National Book Award in 1992 for All the Pretty Horses, and he received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, but never the Nobel.
Why doesn't Cormac McCarthy use quotation marks?
He thought there was no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. He preferred simple declarative sentences with minimal punctuation, used no semicolons at all, and often left dialogue unattributed, trusting the reader to follow who is speaking.
When did Cormac McCarthy die?
Cormac McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on June 13, 2023, at the age of 89.
What was Cormac McCarthy's last book?
Stella Maris, published on December 6, 2022, six weeks after its companion novel The Passenger. Both appeared about six months before his death.
Footnotes
- Cormac McCarthy — Wikipedia
- The Passenger — Wikipedia
- Stella Maris — Wikipedia
- Cormac McCarthy, American novelist of the stark and dark, dies at 89 — NPR
- Sixteen Years After The Road, Cormac McCarthy Is Publishing Two New Novels — The New York Times
- Cormac Country — Vanity Fair
- Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction — The New York Times
- The Road — The Pulitzer Prizes
- The official Cormac McCarthy site — Penguin Random House
Bibliography last verified 10 September 2026.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
— Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
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