After decades in obscurity, McCarthy achieved his first mainstream commercial breakthrough with the bestselling novel All the Pretty Horses (1992), drawing new attention from critics and scholars.

Its contents have focused on literary criticism of McCarthy's works as well as biographical and historical research on topics related to his life and fiction.

Between the publication of his first novel in 1965 until about 1992, he received little critical notice—much less than his major contemporaries (i.e., those born in the 1930s) like Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon.

[11] The literary society gathered an informal group of scholars who had attended the first academic conference on McCarthy, which took place October 1993 at Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky.

[12] Most scholars in attendance came from universities in the Southern United States and had overlapping interests in literature of the South, particularly William Faulkner, to whom McCarthy was often compared.

[24] James McWilliams, a professor at Texas State University, remarked that the announcement signaled a "rare honor for any writer, much less a living one, to achieve" and said the journal's adoption by a university press "speaks volumes about the enduring themes that McCarthy continues to engage with Faulknerian ambition and Homeric prose.

"[22] The journal's back catalog of articles, including those that were self-published by the Cormac McCarthy Society, became available online through scholarly databases like JSTOR and Project MUSE.

Journal contributions in this area by the Knoxville, Tennessee-based writer Wesley Morgan have been especially noted; these include coverage of McCarthy's high school years, documentation of real-life people who provided inspiration for characters in Suttree (1979), and a detailed tracing of the route taken by the characters in The Road (2006) based on close reading of geographical landmarks.

[27] As of 2013, Blood Meridian (1985) was the most-discussed of McCarthy's works in the journal, while bestsellers like All the Pretty Horses (1992), No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Road had also received significant attention.

[28] In the journal's first issue, an article by Dianne C. Luce—who was then-president of the McCarthy Society—remarked that scholarship up to that time had prioritized the author's more recent Westerns, starting with Blood Meridian and continuing with The Border Trilogy, while tending to overlook his Southern works: the novels The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree, and the dramas The Gardener's Son (1977) and The Stonemason (1995).

"[34] In 2022, the journal published an archival trove of several rare interviews with McCarthy printed in small newspapers in Tennessee and Kentucky, between 1968 and 1980.

[35] Given the author's reluctance to engage with the press, the journal's find was considered a noteworthy source of insight into the early period of his career.