Isolato

A raw, sweeping biography of Cormac McCarthy, the legendary author of such era-defining novels as The Road, Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses—written by a bestselling journalist with extraordinary personal access to the man and his world

Laurence Gonzales’s Isolato is a powerful and revealing biography of Cormac McCarthy, shining new light on the life and work of one of the most important and bestselling authors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawn from Gonzales’s many conversations with McCarthy himself, and from new, exclusive interviews with McCarthy’s family, friends, lovers, drinking buddies, and more, Isolato presents a startling portrait of McCarthy, by turns brilliant and mercurial, sympathetic and monstrous, capturing the uniquely commanding writer whose brutal childhood in rural Tennessee provided a font for the startling idiosyncratic visions of his work.

These pages trace an engrossing arc from McCarthy’s earliest days tramping through the limestone caves of Brown Mountain to the years writing the remarkable run of novels from The Orchard Keeper to his masterpiece, Blood Meridian; and through the extraordinary success of the Border Trilogy and The Road. Gonzales recounts McCarthy’s deep affiliation with the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, where later in life he found a warm embrace amongst some of the most brilliant scientific thinkers of the age. Here is both the McCarthy whose near-mystic writing process—which he called “the Night Shift”—would transform the darkness of the American landscape into myth; and the McCarthy who abandoned his first child and multiple wives, rendered each of his homes unlivable in a quixotic quest for aesthetic perfection, and whose rage was eventually soothed by the profound love that grew for his youngest son, John Francis, in the last decades of his life.

Isolato is a revelatory look at a conflicted genius. Written with the candor of a journalist and the warmth of an acquaintance, this book makes a profound contribution to our understanding of one of the most epic and influential writers in all of American literature.