Chapter 3 - The Southwest

Summary

Cormac McCarthy’s five Western novels and Western screenplay, operating along the contested border between Mexico and the United States, are among his most masterful and iconic. The “American West” is not just a region of the US. In each of these works, McCarthy aesthetically renders the parched geography of the American Southwest, the complex political history of the contested region, and the more esoteric problems of nationalism, imperialism, and environmental destruction in brutal, vivid prose. This chapter explores, first, the significance of the American Southwest as a politically fraught and geographically distinctive region for McCarthy as a writer. Second, it examines the distinctive stylistics of McCarthy’s Southwestern works and how they shape his legacy as one of the greatest American writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.