McCarthy The Road

About The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and is the most widely read and emotionally overwhelming of his novels — a post-apocalyptic survival story about a father and his young son crossing a devastated America toward the coast, through cold and ash and the constant threat of cannibalistic survivors. McCarthy wrote it inspired by a vision of a post-catastrophe El Paso he had while staying in a hotel with his son. The prose is at its most minimal, the love between father and son never sentimentalized and never named — and perhaps the most moving relationship in his fiction. It is the novel that definitively established his international reputation and introduced the broadest readership to his work. No Country for Old Men (2005), Blood Meridian (1985), and All the Pretty Horses (1992) are the essential companions.