Dr . Chris Walsh to lead book talk on Tuesday, April 17 in Hodges Library
The importance of Appalachia in the works of Cormac McCarthy will be the topic of a book talk sponsored by UT Libraries on Tuesday, April 17 from 12-1:30 p.m. in room 605 of Hodges Library. The event is free and open to the public.
Dr. Chris Walsh, a lecturer in UT’s English department, will discuss how McCarthy’s Appalachia is a place for rejuvenation and regeneration in his most recent work, The Road. Published in 2006, The Road was nominated for a National Book Critic’s Circle Award and chosen by Oprah Winfrey as her latest book club selection. Walsh will also speak about McCarthy’s four early novels, The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God, and Suttree, which are all set in Appalachia.
Cormac McCarthy is one of the most unique, paradoxical and demanding voices in Southern and American literature. The Road is a post-apocalyptic tale that describes a journey taken by a father and his young son. Over several months, the father and son travel across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm which destroyed civilization and most life on earth. In the book McCarthy uses the physical and figurative terrain of Appalachia to a haunting degree.
The event is sponsored by the University of Tennessee Libraries Ready for the World committee. Dr. Walsh is a a McCarthy scholar and has also organized The Road Home: McCarthy’s Imaginative Return to the South, a conference sponsored by the University of Tennessee English Department to be held April 26-28. Visit www.lib.utk.edu/refs/mccarthy/ for more information about the conference.
About Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933 and moved to Knoxville with his family when he was four. He attended the University of Tennessee from 1951-52 and 1957-59 but never graduated. While at UT he published two stories in The Phoenix and was awarded the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960. He has written ten novels. All the Pretty Horses, published in 1992, won the National Book Award and brought McCarthy into the public spotlight. He currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico with his wife and young son.