Steven Frye – författare

Literary naturalism at play in one of America’s most visionary novelists: Cormac McCarthy

It took six novels and nearly thirty years for Cormac McCarthy to find commercial success with the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, followed by major prizes, more best sellers, and Hollywood adaptations of his work. Those successes, though, have obscured McCarthy’s commitment to an older form of literary expression: naturalism.

It is hardly a secret that McCarthy’s work tends to darker themes: violence, brutality, the cruel indifference of nature, themes which would not be out of place in the writing of Jack London or Stephen Crane. But literary naturalism is more than the oversimplified Darwinism that many think of. Nature may be red in tooth and claw, and humans are part of nature, but the humanity depicted in naturalist literature is capable of love, selflessness, and spirituality, as well.

In Unguessed Kinships, Steven Frye illuminates all these dimensions of McCarthy’s work. In his novels and plays, McCarthy engages both explicitly and obliquely with the project of manifest destiny, in the western drama Blood Meridian, the Tennessee Valley Authority-era Tennessee novels, and the atomic frontier of Alamogordo in Cities of the Plain. McCarthy’s concerns are deeply religious and philosophical, drawing on ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, and Nietzsche, among other sources. Frye argues for McCarthy not merely as a naturalist writer but as a naturalist in the most expansive sense. Unguessed Kinships includes biographical and historical context in each chapter, widening the appeal of the text to not just naturalists or McCarthy scholars but anyone studying the literature of the South or the West.

Named by Harold Bloom as one of the most significant American novelists of our time, Cormac McCarthy has been honored with the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for All the Pretty Horses, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the coveted MacArthur Fellowship. Steven Frye offers a comprehensive treatment of McCarthy''s fiction to date, dealing with the author''s aesthetic and thematic concerns, his philosophical and religious influences, and his participation in Western literary traditions.

Frye provides extensive readings of each novel, charting the trajectory of McCarthy''s development as a writer who invigorates literary culture both past and present through a blend of participation, influence, and aesthetic transformation. Understanding Cormac McCarthy explores the early works of the Tennessee period in the context of the "romance" genre, the southern gothic and grotesque, as well as the carnivalesque. A chapter is devoted to Blood Meridian, a novel that marks McCarthy''s transition to the West and his full recognition as a major force in American letters. In the final two chapters, Frye explores McCarthy''s Border Trilogy and his later works— specifically No Country for Old Men and The Road—addressing the manner in which McCarthy''s preoccupation with violence and human depravity exists alongside a perpetual search for meaning, purpose, and value.

Frye provides scholars, students, and general readers alike with a clearly argued foundational examination of McCarthy''s novels in their historical and literary contexts as an ideal roadmap illuminating the author''s work as it charts the dark and mythic topography of the American frontier.