Although it initially garnered a lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since been regarded as his magnum opus, with some labeling it the Great American Novel.

The films All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Child of God were also adapted from his works of the same names, and Outer Dark was turned into a 15-minute short.

McCarthy worked with the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary research center, where he published the essay "The Kekulé Problem" (2017), which explores the human unconscious and the origin of language.

[10] The family first lived on Noelton Drive in the upscale Sequoyah Hills subdivision, but by 1941, had settled in a house on Martin Mill Pike in South Knoxville.

[21] When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack.

[12] He had finished the novel while working part time at an auto-parts warehouse in Chicago and submitted the manuscript "blindly" to Albert Erskine of Random House.

[15] In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania hoping to visit Ireland.

Also in 1966, he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark (1968).

[30] In 1974, Richard Pearce of PBS contacted McCarthy and asked him to write the screenplay for an episode of Visions, a television drama series.

Beginning in early 1975, and armed with only "a few photographs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre-Civil War industrialist William Gregg as inspiration", McCarthy and Pearce spent a year traveling the South to research the subject of industrialization there.

Jerome Charyn likened it to a doomed Huckleberry Finn, noting how the Yew tree of the author's sprawling Tennessee garden was inspiration for the "christening of what became the principal character's name.

[37] In a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997).

[51] John Hillcoat directed the 2009 film adaptation, written by Joe Penhall, and starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Mark Kermode of The Guardian found it "datedly naff",[60] and Peter Travers of Rolling Stone described it as "a droning meditation on capitalism".

[62] McCarthy was a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a multidisciplinary research center devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems.

The book was influenced by his time among scientists; it has been described by SFI biologist David Krakauer as "full-blown Cormac 3.0—a mathematical [and] analytical novel".

[65] In a 2024 interview, Hillcoat said he and McCarthy spent extended time discussing the film, which the author once volunteered to write and envisioned as a "Faustian tale, the journey of the Judge trying to win the soul of the kid, and consume everything in his path."

[1] He told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred "simple declarative sentences" and that he used capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, or a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons, which he labeled as "idiocy".

[80] The bleak outlook of the future, and the inhuman foreign antagonist Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men, is said to reflect the apprehension of the post-9/11 era.

This is seen in Blood Meridian with the murder spree the Glanton Gang initiates because of the bounties, the "overwhelmed" law enforcement in No Country for Old Men, and the corrupt police officers in All the Pretty Horses.

[15] McCarthy was fluent in Spanish, having lived in Ibiza, Spain in the 1960s and later residing in El Paso, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

[84] Isabel Soto argues that after he learned the language, "Spanish and English modulate or permeate each other" in his novels, as it was "an essential part of McCarthy's expressive discourse".

This is also the case of several other important characters in the Border Trilogy, including Billy Parhnam [sic], John Grady's mother (and possibly his grandfather and brothers), and perhaps Jimmy Blevins, each of whom are speakers of Spanish who were ostensibly born in the US political space into families with what are generally considered English-speaking surnames ...

Book dealer Glenn Horowitz said the modest typewriter acquired "a sort of talismanic quality" through its connection to McCarthy's monumental fiction, "as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army knife".

According to Richard B. Woodward, "McCarthy doesn't drink anymore – he quit 16 years ago [i.e. in 1976] in El Paso, with one of his young girlfriends – and Suttree reads like a farewell to that life.

[75] In the late 1990s, McCarthy moved to Tesuque, New Mexico, north of Santa Fe, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John.

[23] In 2013, Scottish writer Michael Crossan created a Twitter account impersonating McCarthy, quickly amassing several thousand followers and recognition by former site owner Jack Dorsey.

[100] In one of his few interviews, McCarthy revealed that he respected only authors who "deal with issues of life and death", citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples of writers who do not.

"[23] At MacArthur reunions, McCarthy shunned his fellow writers to fraternize instead with scientists like physicist Murray Gell-Mann and whale biologist Roger Payne.

"[106] In 2003, literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy as one of the four major living American novelists, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip Roth.