Is Cormac McCarthy “Based”?

If there was ever an author who screamed “the great American novelist,” it’s Cormac McCarthy. From 1965’s The Orchard Keeper to the twinned publication of The Passenger with its companion novel, Stella Marris, shortly before his death in 2023, McCarthy produced a body of work which has been seriously (and reasonably) compared with not only that of Herman Melville and William Faulkner but even biblical scripture in the depth of its spiritual aesthetics.