Event Focuses on Pulitzer Winner
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Novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won the Pulitzer earlier this year for his latest, The Road, was the subject of a conference on campus last spring.
Leading scholars of McCarthy’s work spoke, and UT’s Chris Walsh presented a pre-conference book talk entitled “Knoxville and Appalachia in the Works of Cormac McCarthy.”
The Road was chosen for the Oprah Winfrey book club, and the normally reclusive McCarthy taped an interview for broadcast on Winfrey’s television show.
McCarthy grew up in Knoxville and attended UT from 1951-52 and from 1957-59. One of his earlier novels, Suttree, is set in Knoxville.
Here’s a quick excerpt of Chris Walsh’s article about McCarthy in the upcoming fall 2007 issue of Tennessee Alumnus magazine.
McCarthy’s first novels are mired in the history, myth, humor, and folkways of Knoxville and East Tennessee. The Orchard Keeper tells the tale of a trio of mountain folk who attempt to uphold traditional ways against the onslaught of modernity. Outer Dark is a disquieting gothic novel attuned to the violent and bloody frontier past of East Tennessee, whereas Child Of God is a study in dispossession and marginalization, another macabre narrative made all the more poignant for its stripped down, economical style.
Suttree is by far the most complex and aesthetically accomplished within McCarthy’s Southern canon…. As the preface to the novel informs us, the book is, like the city of Knoxville, “constructed on no known paradigm.”
Listen to a WUOT podcast of an interview with Chris Walsh discussing the conference.