Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of July 20th
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It is the 201st day of the year, leaving 164 days remaining in 2022.
On this date in 1933, the novelist Cormac McCarthy was born. He tells his stories in a sparse, simple, yet powerful language. The tales, usually bleak and violent and set in the south or southwestern United States, tell about dystopian futures, social outcasts, and oppressive authority.
He is known for typing his novels on an old mechanical typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32 model, then editing them by hand. When his first typewriter gave out in 2009, he auctioned it off for a quarter million dollars and accepted another one for $11.
His first book, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1966. It concerns a murder and a hidden corpse, and the impact on a small group in the rural backwoods of Tennessee. It won the William Faulkner Foundation award for first novel.
Over the next 15 years, McCarthy wrote several novels and screenplays. He won the MacArthur Foundation grant, and used the money to research and write Blood Meridian, which explores the nature of good versus evil in a violent, macabre tale about scalp hunters in the old southwest. Eventually, critics determined it to be one of McCarthy's finest works.
All the Pretty Horses in 1992 brought him popular fame and the National Book Award, and No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Road (2006) brought him more fame and critical acclaim, with the latter winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. All three books were adapted for the movie screen.
McCarthy continues to write novels and screenplays at his home in the American southwest. He is publishing two novels this year, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
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