Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

Many critics compare Blood Meridian to William Faulkner's work in fact, Bloom has called Blood Meridian 'the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying.' Others have compared Judge Holden to Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, which was supposedly one of McCarthy's great influences while he was writing Blood Meridian. However, the novel is still widely considered to be McCarthy's defining work. Even theorist Harold Bloom, one of its most devoted champions, admits its difficulty. Admittedly, many critics and readers alike have found Blood Meridian difficult to get through. At the time, the novel garnered little critical attention, although the New York Times' Caryn James described it as a 'slap in the face,' praising the novel as 'impossible to ignore.' At the end of her review, however, James decries the novel's lack of coherence and rigor. Random House published Blood Meridian in 1985.

McCarthy visited all of the locales he mentions in Blood Meridian and even learned Spanish in order to make the novel more authentic. At the time, McCarthy was living in a motel in Knoxville, Tennessee run by one of his friends, and he used the MacArthur money to conduct extensive research. The novel has been celebrated for its historical accuracy as well as McCarthy's signature literary style, which is evident in the densely poetic yet matter-of-fact language, the characters who straddle both gritty reality and familiar archetype, and its pervasively bleak and violent atmosphere.Ĭormac McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian after receiving one of the MacArthur Foundation's prestigious and lucrative fellowships in 1981. During this time, vigilante, mercenary gangs patrolled the Mexican/American border in pursuit of Apache Indians whose existence threatened the introduction of Western civilization. It is a revisionist Western in which McCarthy explores the era after the Mexican-American War. Many critics describe Blood Meridian as one of the most important novels of the 20th century.

Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy