向西而行：麦卡锡的转变与美国文学

Heading west at 40 transformed his writing—and American literature. By Michael O’Donnell To understand Cormac McCarthy’s midlife crisis, look at America’s landscape. The fierce writer of biblical prose spent most of his first four decades anchored to Tennessee, a child of Appalachia with a lilting drawl and a regional outlook. By the early 1970s, he had published three Faulknerian novels—none of which sold well—and was struggling to finish a fourth book that aimed to chronicle his hometown of Knoxville in the way James Joyce had written about Dublin. McCarthy’s pockets were empty and his second marriage was failing. …