The Unmatched Brilliance of Cormac McCarthy's Literary Legacy.
Cormac McCarthy, the American novelist who died at the age of 89, spent his life trying to accommodate the novel to the two most famous kinds of artistic statements known to us—biblical prophecy and Greek tragedy. His novels received good reviews, but only a few thousand people bought them until he became famous for All The Pretty Horses. McCarthy's overarching theme was violence, and he believed that there's no such thing as life without bloodshed. His critics call his prose manly, and his success is a sign of American decadence, an irregular but irrepressible flirting with nihilism.