McCarthy Suttree Reading Order

Cormac McCarthy's Suttree (1979) is the least read and most personal of his major novels — 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 and his father's expectations to live on a houseboat on the Tennessee River and make a meager living selling catfish. The novel is McCarthy's portrait of his own city and his own people — the fishermen, drifters, hustlers, prostitutes, and alcoholics of the Knoxville riverfront — and it is written in a prose of such density and beauty that it represents his most sustained attempt at pure style. Suttree is one of the great American novels of vagrancy and refusal, in the tradition of Whitman and Twain, and it contains some of the funniest scenes McCarthy ever wrote alongside some of the most harrowing.