Over the last few days one of the volumes for which I am grateful is Walsh’s volume on Cormac McCarthy, In the Wake of the Sun: Navigating the Southern Works of Cormac McCarthy.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Dante, Hardy, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, O’Connor, and a few others, I read and reread consistently. And the same goes for McCarthy. And I rejoice to see the scholarship surrounding McCarthy continue to grow.

Recently, since the author’s death, scholars were allowed by the family to get into McCarthy’s library, catalogue it, and begin its placement (much of it, anyway) to the University of Tennessee, where McCarthy studied but left without his undergraduate degree (he was 9 hours short, and was bored). A genius like McCarthy is not cut out for the basics.

If you, too, love the Southern novels, The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, Outer Dark, Suttree, The Road, and the plays The Gardener’s Son, and The Stonemason, this book of scholarship is a gem.

McCarthy’s other works are of course alluded to but this work remains focused primarily on the works listed above.

Well done, Christopher Walsh, well done. Thanks for sharing your demonstrative appreciation for and scholarship of the growing recognition of the formidable writer, Cormac McCarthy.