This is the WBEZ Book Club. I'm Jordan Rich. Last week we began
mourning the passing of Cormac McCarthy, one of this nation's most dynamic novelists,
who not only wrote twelve books, but also produced plays, screenplays, and
short stories. His name is synonymous with hard bitten westerns, both old time
and modern, and classics about dystopian society, most notably his Poetzer Prize winning
achievement, a book called The Road. Some of his projects, including The
Road and No Country for Old Men, were produced as commercially successful films.
But sets Cormack McCarthy's writing apart from most other successful writers is his philosophy that
syntax be damned. In stark novels about death, life, and death again,
punctuation would often disappear and attribution would be hard to find. Once you
realized it was a strategic move on his part, it made the reading that
much more fun. His contributions to American literature are vast. And the good
news is Cormack McCarthy's books will be with us forever. And that's the Book
Club. WZ, Boston's news radio