The first major biography of the author ... It complicates the story of McCarthy’s life in ways that will both trouble us further and ground us in a more nuanced reckoning ... Proceeds with cleareyed care in considering the controversy surrounding his relationships with women ... Daugherty fills important gaps in the record ... By any reasonable measure, McCarthy comes across as delinquent and double-dealing and selfish. The facts, as Daugherty narrates them, speak for themselves. Which is to say, Daugherty lets them speak ... Daugherty has begun the work that one hopes literary biography can do: unearth the story of how the art escaped the confines of the flawed life that yielded it.
Engrossing ... Daughterty...deftly separates the writer from the myth, capturing McCarthy’s evolution from a Southern writer to a Western one with a biography that pulls you along like a novel. But he doesn’t shy away from the troubling details.
Good enough, at least for a first crack at McCarthy. It divulges a lot of new information, dispels myths, has strong set pieces and does a bloodhound’s job of tracing the overlaps between the life and the work ... On the downside, it’s hampered by consistent intrusions of flowery language, as if the biographer got too excited and tried to compete with his subject ... Daugherty is a sensitive reader of the novels, but he’s especially good on the making of them, and on the editors who helped McCarthy along the way.
Daughterty...approaches Cormac McCarthy with the patience of a historian and the instincts of a novelist. Rather than reducing McCarthy to the familiar mythology of the reclusive genius wandering the American Southwest, Daugherty reveals the complicated, contradictory man behind the legend ... Daugherty illuminates this enigmatic figure, navigating the tension between the 'hermit of Santa Fe' and the reality of a man drawn to the theoretical research at the Sante Fe Institute, all while exploring the cost of genius and the enduring, stark brilliance of a singular American voice.
The myth is deconstructed, the curtain pulled back, and McCarthy is revealed as every bit as compelling but now better understood. With prose and insights reminiscent of a McCarthy story, this book follows his family, his upbringing, and his adult life.
