Cormac McCarthy's Maps and Mazes: Tracing the Critical Reception

Traces the scholarly conversation on McCarthy, an ever-changing and challenging author who asked big questions, from his obscure beginnings to the height of his fame and beyond.


From the beginning of a career that encapsulated decades-long obscurity, best-selling fame, and a Pulitzer Prize, Cormac McCarthy engaged with big questions. Are people inherently violent? Inherently moral? How do we understand the divine? How do we understand each other-if at all? What is the nature of reality? What does it mean to be human? These are philosophical questions, but McCarthy didn't write philosophical treatises: he wrote novels, plays, and screenplays that engage with his many and varied interests. Scholarship on McCarthy has addressed those questions and interests, and taken as a whole, it shows how his work takes us from deep dives into the details of historical context, regional identity, and literary allusion to ways of understanding the world more broadly.

Until McCarthy's death in 2023, scholars continually adapted to an author who experimented with differing forms, genres, and settings, all in an effort to capture big-picture truths. This study traces the critical engagement with McCarthy's work through his changes in genre, style, and interests. It is the story of an ongoing scholarly conversation that follows McCarthy's big questions and posits what some of the answers might be.

STACEY PEEBLES is H.W. Stodghill, Jr. and Adele H. Stodghill Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies, Centre College, Danville, KY.