Recommendations
Books Like Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy
For readers of the Border Trilogy's elegiac conclusion
If Cities of the Plain's portrait of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham on the last working ranch, the fatal love affair, and the moving coda of Billy in old age moved you, these books complete the Border Trilogy or explore the dying West tradition.
- 1
Buy on AmazonAll the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
The Border Trilogy's first volume — essential for understanding John Grady Cole; his character, his excellence with horses, and his romantic nature are established here, making his death in Cities of the Plain carry its full weight.
- 2
Buy on AmazonThe Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
The Border Trilogy's second volume — essential for understanding Billy Parham; his three journeys into Mexico and the losses he has already carried are established here, making Billy's survival and late coda in Cities of the Plain carry their full weight.
- 3
Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's masterpiece — the essential companion; the border violence that the Border Trilogy romanticizes is its historical truth in Blood Meridian, and reading it after Cities of the Plain reveals what John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are the last survivors of.
- 4
Buy on AmazonNo Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most accessible major novel — the companion in his meditation on endings; the West Texas of No Country is what the New Mexico of the Border Trilogy becomes after the ranches close and the oil money takes over.
- 5
Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer-winning Western — the most important companion in the American Western literary tradition; Call and McCrae's cattle drive is the epic, large-scale version of what the Border Trilogy's three cowboys represent — the end of the cowboy as a possible American life.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's great novel — the companion in American literature about the death of romantic dream; Gatsby's inability to accept that the past is past is the companion to John Grady Cole's inability to accept that the world he believes in no longer exists.
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Buy on AmazonSuttree
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most personal novel — the companion in his meditation on men who are out of their time; Suttree's voluntary exile from his class is the Tennessee version of John Grady Cole's voluntary exile from the modern world.
- 8Buy on Amazon
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's post-apocalyptic Pulitzer winner — the companion in his meditation on what fathers and sons (here: father and daughter of the West) hand down in a world that is ending; both novels are elegies for something that will not be recovered.
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