Reading Order
All the Pretty HorsesCormac McCarthy Border Trilogy Reading Order
Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (1992) won the National Book Award and announced McCarthy's arrival in the mainstream of American fiction — the coming-of-age story of John Grady Cole, a Texas teenager who rides into Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins after his family's ranch is sold, and finds work as a horse trainer on a Mexican hacienda before falling in love with the owner's daughter and being arrested by the Mexican police. The most romantic and most accessible of McCarthy's major novels.
Where to start
All the Pretty Horses
Complete All the Pretty Horses Book List
- 1Buy
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy·1992·Start here — the most accessible and romantic of McCarthy's major novels; the National Book Award winner and the best introduction to his prose style and his concern with men in landscape without the extreme violence of Blood Meridian or The Road. - 2Buy
The Crossing
Cormac McCarthy·1994·The second volume of the Border Trilogy — Billy Parham's multiple crossings into Mexico, organized around a captured wolf and what happens when he tries to return her to the mountains; more elegiac and less plot-driven than All the Pretty Horses, but the companion piece in the trilogy. - 3Buy
Cities of the Plain
Cormac McCarthy·1998·The third volume of the Border Trilogy — John Grady Cole and Billy Parham working together on a New Mexico ranch; the conclusion of both their stories; the most conventionally plotted of the trilogy and the most clearly elegiac about the end of the American West. - 4Buy
No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy·2005·McCarthy's thriller — the drug deal gone wrong, Llewelyn Moss, and the unstoppable Anton Chigurh; the most immediately readable and the most widely known of his later novels through the Coen Brothers film; shares All the Pretty Horses's Texas landscape and its concern with the violence that underlies the American Southwest. - 5Buy
The Road
Cormac McCarthy·2006·McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning post-apocalyptic novel — a father and son walking south through a dead America; the ultimate expression of the father-son tenderness that All the Pretty Horses's John Grady Cole has lost and is trying to recover, rendered in a world stripped of everything except the relationship itself.
All the Pretty Horses — Frequently Asked Questions
Is All the Pretty Horses a good first Cormac McCarthy novel?
Yes — it's the most recommended starting point for McCarthy, far more accessible than Blood Meridian (extremely violent, dense, almost no punctuation) and more conventionally romantic than No Country for Old Men. The prose is beautiful and not as syntactically challenging as his earlier work; the love story gives it emotional stakes that help carry readers through the more demanding elements. After All the Pretty Horses, most readers go on to The Road (shorter, more immediately moving) or No Country for Old Men (most thriller-like and accessible).
What is the Border Trilogy?
The Border Trilogy is McCarthy's three connected novels set in the American Southwest and northern Mexico in the mid-twentieth century: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). The first two follow different protagonists (John Grady Cole in All the Pretty Horses; Billy Parham in The Crossing) who come together in the third volume. The trilogy is McCarthy's most extended examination of the relationship between the American Southwest and northern Mexico, and his most sustained elegy for the passing of a particular way of life in the American West.
Why does McCarthy not use quotation marks?
McCarthy deliberately removes quotation marks and conventional punctuation from his prose — a style he developed in his earlier Appalachian novels and maintained throughout his career. His stated reason is that quotation marks are typographical devices that interrupt the reader's absorption in the prose; he wants the dialogue to flow as naturally from the page as speech flows in the world. The style forces readers to pay attention to the rhythm of sentences and the context of speech rather than relying on typographical signals, and it gives all his dialogue a quality of being equally weighted with the narration that surrounds it.
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