Cormac McCarthy was America’s great shaman-storyteller. His novels often seem as much called into being as written, demanded by the weight of the past forever encroaching into the present, and filled with ancient blood truths asserting themselves through whatever gloss of civilization we paint across man’s moral nature. But of course McCarthy was also merely human, an enchanter with words, an epic portraitist of the American landscape, a dour and exacting witness to character, and a link to the heyday of the Great American Novel.
He deserves a biographer equal to the task of depicting his contradictory personal story, his monk-like devotion to his art, the muddy origins of his stark, noble, and often downright ghastly themes, his obsession with the skull beneath the skin and the viscera of life, and his literary and philosophical influences. Unfortunately, Tracy Daugherty, author of Cormac McCarthy: A Legacy Revisited, is not that biographer.
