McCarthy Suttree

About Suttree

Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (1979) is his most personal novel — a sprawling, Joycean masterpiece set in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the 1950s, following Cornelius Suttree, the son of a prosperous family who has rejected his class to live on a houseboat and sell catfish. Written in a prose of extraordinary richness, Suttree is McCarthy's portrait of his own city and its riverfront community of fishermen, drifters, hustlers, and drinkers, and it contains some of the funniest scenes in his fiction alongside some of the most harrowing. It was the last of his Appalachian novels before he turned west with Blood Meridian (1985). Many McCarthy scholars consider it his greatest work; it is the least read of his major novels and the most rewarding for readers who have exhausted the better-known books.