Epilogue No End

Abstract

What’s to come? After fifty years with ten novels, a screenplay, and two theater pieces, Cormac McCarthy stands among the master storytellers of contemporary American literature. He has written his way from old-growth Appalachian woods into riverfront postmodernism, across the Mexican border struggles and onto Southwest hardscrabble wars in our own time. The violence in his stories is legendary and unbearable to some, the integrity of historical witness faultless, the characters, settings, and details of his plots accurate and captivating.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

—Wilfred Owen