Cormac McCarthy

Although he had achieved a considerable amount of critical success (having received the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing, a Rockerfeller Foundation Grant, and a MacArthur Fellowship among others), popular success had largely eluded Cormac McCarthy. That changed with All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of McCarthy's so-called “Border Trilogy,” which sold more than 190,000 copies in hardcover and remained on the New York Times bestsellers list for six months. The novel won the 1992 National Book Award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1993. None of his previous novels (he has written five others, including the Faulkner Award-winning The Orchard Keeper [1965]) sold more than 5,000 copies. The second volume of the border trilogy, The Crossing, sold more than 200,000 copies in the first month. McCarthy published the final volume, Cities of the Plain, in 1998.