In June, Cormac McCarthy — our greatest living writer — slipped from this world to the next and joined his forebears Melville, Twain, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor in the American literary pantheon.
By noon the following day, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, his magnum opus, had reached number eight on Amazon’s Top 100 Books, assuring that, for the first time, it would hit the New York Times Paperback Bestseller List; a curious development for a novel that, when it was first published in 1985, failed to sell its initial print run of 1,500 and was quickly remaindered.
But since its inauspicious debut, Blood Meridian has only grown in reputation and is now widely considered to be McCarthy’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of our era — quite possibly, the Great American Novel critics have searched for. It has sold steadily, if not swiftly, since the 1992 publication of All the Pretty Horses, the novel that made McCarthy famous.
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