In 1974, Richard Pearce reached Cormac 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," he and McCarthy spent a year traveling the South in order to research the subject matter.

Two years later, Robert returns after hearing word of his mother's illness but he is too late and finds her being buried on the same property as the mill.

Also, Robert McEvoy is misunderstood and spends a large portion of the movie without one or both of his parents in his life, much like other protagonists in McCarthy's works.

However, after he eliminates the problem of James and returns to be punished by the very system that he wanted to correct, he loses this role and is left empty and "impotent.

[5] In a foreword to the book, Pearce wrote: For Cormac McCarthy, at least from my vantage point, it was a year of pure alchemy, much of it spent translating what could have been a dry academic expose into a strange and haunting tale of impotence, rage, and ultimately violence among two generations of owners and workers, fathers and son, during the rise and fall of one of America's most bizarre utopian industrial experiments.

[7] A review in Booklist called it a "monumental small work for McCarthy, lesser in scope and impact than his All the Pretty Horses (1992) or The Crossing (1994) but bearing in full measure his gift—that ability to fit complex and universal emotions into ordinary lives and still preserve all of their power and significance.

"[8] In 2010, Niall Griffiths wrote in The Daily Telegraph that "McCarthy's ear for nervous and energetic dialogue is often overshadowed by the heights of his descriptive prose, yet the beauties of his speech can equal those of his narrative," particularly in The Gardener's Son and his other dramas.