Cormac McCarthy
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Cormac McCarthy
moved to Knoxville in 1937 when he was just four years old. He
attended Knoxville Catholic High School and the University of
Tennessee. His early “Tennessee” novels are set in Knoxville and the
region surrounding it. His fourth novel, Suttree, takes place almost
entirely in downtown Knoxville in the early 1950s. Famous for his
amazing attention to detail in his description of setting and landscape,
McCarthy brings to life in Suttree the darker sides of Knoxville’s midcentury
urban scene.
“Dear friend now in the
dusty clockless hours of the
town when the streets lie
black and steaming in the
wake of the watertrucks and
now when the drunk and the
homeless have washed up
in the lee of walls in alleys
or abandoned lots and cats
go forth highshouldered
and lean in the grim
perimeters about, now in
these sootblacked brick or
cobbled corridors where
lightwire shadows make a
gothic harp of cellar doors
no soul shall walk save you.” [from Suttree]
Cormac McCarthy
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Cormac McCarthy
moved to Knoxville in 1937 when he was just four years old. He
attended Knoxville Catholic High School and the University of
Tennessee. His early “Tennessee” novels are set in Knoxville and the
region surrounding it. His fourth novel, Suttree, takes place almost
entirely in downtown Knoxville in the early 1950s. Famous for his
amazing attention to detail in his description of setting and landscape,
McCarthy brings to life in Suttree the darker sides of Knoxville’s midcentury
urban scene.
“Dear friend now in the
dusty clockless hours of the
town when the streets lie
black and steaming in the
wake of the watertrucks and
now when the drunk and the
homeless have washed up
in the lee of walls in alleys
or abandoned lots and cats
go forth highshouldered
and lean in the grim
perimeters about, now in
these sootblacked brick or
cobbled corridors where
lightwire shadows make a
gothic harp of cellar doors
no soul shall walk save you.” [from Suttree]
...the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle...
— Annemarie Schwarzenbach —