American writer in the Southern gothic tradition whose novels about wayward characters in the rural American South and Southwest are noted for their dark violence, dense prose, and stylistic complexity.

McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1953 to 1956. Readers were first introduced to McCarthy's difficult narrative style in the novel The Orchard Keeper (1965), about a Tennessee man and his two mentors. Social outcasts highlight such novels as Outer Dark (1968), about two incestuous siblings; Child of God (1974), about a lonely man's descent into depravity; and Suttree (1979), about a man who overcomes his fixation on death.

After Blood Meridian (1985), a violent frontier tale, McCarthy achieved popular fame with All the Pretty Horses (1992), winner of the National Book Award. The first volume of The Border Trilogy, it is the coming-of-age story of John Grady Cole, a Texan who travels to Mexico. The second installment, The Crossing (1994), set before and during World War II, follows the picaresque adventures of brothers Billy and Boyd Parham and centres around three round-trip passages that Billy makes from southwestern New Mexico to Mexico. The trilogy concludes with Cities of the Plain (1998), which interweaves the lives of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham through their employment on a ranch in New Mexico.

McCarthy's later works include No Country for Old Men (2005), a modern, bloody western that opens with a drug deal gone bad. In the postapocalyptic The Road (2006; Pulitzer Prize), a father and son struggle to survive after a disaster, left unspecified, has all but destroyed the United States.