Charles Joseph "Cormac" McCarthy, Jr., winner of the 1992 National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses, attended the University of Tennessee from 1951 to 1952 and again from 1957 to 1960. He left college in 1960 to pursue a full-time writing career. His first four books, The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree (1979), explored the lives of people in East Tennessee and Appalachia. His later novels, Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), and The Crossing (1994), are set in the southwestern United States.

McCarthy received the William Faulkner Award for his first novel and fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations. In 1991, he received the Jean Stein Award for fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In October of 1993, the English Department of Bellarmine College in Louisville, Kentucky, hosted the first conference on McCarthy's works.