Cormac McCarthy is a mentor I’ve never met. We all have one of those, a teacher who sends us on a quest to seek our teacher’s teacher’s teacher. Here is an ever-growing reading list of my informal study of McCarthy and his influences. I’ll be updating the list on Goodreads.
FICTION
The Novels of Cormac McCarthy (Obviously.) If you’re new to him, and squeamish about blood, start with All the Pretty Horses. Blood Meridian can’t be denied, but it’s gruesome.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Carson McCullers, The heart is a Lonely Hunter
MacKinlay Kantor, Andersonville
James Joyce, Ulysses
Faulkner, lots of Faulkner…
And Shakespeare
Fydor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment & the Brothers Karamazov
Gustav Flaubert, Salammbô
Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
Flannery O’Conner, Complete Stories
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer
Oakley Hall, Warlock
NON-FICTION, PHILOSOPHY, & CRITICISM
Plato
Nietzsche
The King James Bible
Lt. Col. David Grossman, On Killing
Harold Bloom, Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ & Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All the Pretty Horses’
Edwin T. Arnold, Border Trilogy Companion & Perspective on Cormac McCarthy
Steven Frye, the Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy
Georg Guillemin, the Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: a Brief history of Humankind
Leslie Harper Worthington, Cormac McCarthy and the Ghost of Huck Finn
Wallis R. Sanborn, Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy
POETRY
Homer, The Iliad & The Odyssey
Milton, Paradise Lost
W.B Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
Ted Hughes, Crow. There’s no direct influence I can find here, but Hughes is a perfect complement to McCarthy in terms of powerful language and haunting description of the natural world.