Until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992, Cormac McCarthy was considered the best unknown novelist in America. None of his previous novels, which included Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985), had sold more than 2,500 copies in hard cover. There was good reason for his obscurity: McCarthy’s books were, and are, implacably grim and violent. They are also stylistically challenging, often plotless, lacking traditional punctuation and arcane in their vocabulary. And McCarthy did nothing to publicise them or himself. As “the most celebrated recluse in American literature since JD Salinger”, he refuses to go on book tours, won’t teach or lecture, and (reluctantly) gave his first substantive interview only in 1992, to The New York Times.

In the past few months, though, following the award of the Pulitzer prize to his postapocalyptic novel The Road and the release of the acclaimed film version of No Country for Old Men, there have been frequent public sightings of the 74-year-old writer, even, God forbid, a TV interview with Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey had chosen The Road for her book club, a selection that propelled the book’s sales past the million-copy mark far faster than any mere Pulitzer.

CORMAC McCARTHY IS NOW THE GREATEST AMERICAN NOVELIST McCarthy’s fans are messianic, believing he’s the greatest American novelist since William Faulkner. What’s so great about him? Thematically, his novels - 10 so far - have a searing, apocalyptic, existential grandeur. His main characters are solitary outsiders, criminals or outcasts. Stylistically, he is seen as the heir to Faulkner and Joyce. Saul Bellow praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”. Most believe McCarthy’s masterpiece is Blood Meridian, about a gang of mercenaries paid to clear Indians from the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the 1840s, which they do by flaying them and selling their scalps for gold. “In the entire range of American literature, only Moby-Dick bears comparison to Blood Meridian,” believes the critic Steven Shaviro. “Both are epic in scope, cosmically resonant, obsessed with open space and with language, exploring vast uncharted distances with a fanatically patient minuteness.”

CORMAC McCARTHY IS A HAM As many as revere McCarthy disdain him as the biggest phoney in American fiction. The New Yorker calls him “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquises the King James Bible, Shakespearian and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad and Faulkner”. One of his most ardent detractors has been Michiko Kakutani, chief book critic of The New York Times, who sneers at his “sentimentality, pretension and windy self-importance”. Reviewers most often complain of his writing about women. The Texas Monthly: “One can’t help suspecting that deep down, McCarthy wonders, Henry Higgins fashion, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a horse?’ ” On Oprah, the thrice-married writer admitted: “I don’t pretend to understand women.”

CORMAC McCARTHY IS NOT HIS REAL NAME McCarthy was born in 1933, the third of six children, and named Charles after his father, a well-to-do lawyer. In 1937, the family moved from Rhode Island to Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy dropped out of the University of Tennessee and in 1953 joined the air force. At some point, he changed his name to Cormac, apparently after the Irish king. For a while, he lived on Ibiza with his second wife, the singer Anne DeLisle. From the mid1970s until the mid1980s, he lived in El Paso, Texas. He is now married to Jennifer Winkley, an academic, with whom he has a son. He lives just outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

For most of his life, McCarthy was extremely poor, living in barns and shacks and writing in motel rooms. He carried a high-wattage light bulb around in a lens case, and would screw it in so he could see better in motels. Somehow, partly through grants, partly through some kind of inexplicable providence, he survived. “I had no money – I mean none,” he said recently. “I had run out of toothpaste, and I was wondering what to do when I went to the mailbox and there was a free sample.” CORMAC

McCARTHY IS OLD-FASHIONED He likes people to be punctual. “If you can’t know where a man is going to be when he says he’s going to be there, how can you trust him about anything else?” he says.

CORMAC McCARTHY IS A PESSIMIST He believes we’re all going to hell in a handbasket. The Road, his most recent novel, describes what awaits us: McCarthy describes a journey taken by a father and son across a postapocalyptic landscape peopled by violent cannibals after some unnamed cataclysm has destroyed most life and “civilisation”. McCarthy doesn’t believe that the kind of catastrophe he describes will be brought on by a meteor. “We’re going to do ourselves in first,” he says.

CORMAC McCARTHY IS A POET OF VIOLENCE If there is a dominant, recurring theme in McCarthy’s work, it is the unrelenting imminence of human violence. “There is no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he says. His early novels “trade in necrophilia, perversion and baby murder, and reading them one is struck repeatedly by the way he displays the bloody-minded glee of the horror writer, the gross-out artist”, writes the novelist Michael Chabon. Blood Meridian is his bloody masterpiece. The Atlantic called the novel “the most beautifully written, unrelievedly ghastly chronicle of violence, carnage, torture, rapine, plunder, murder and every other conceivable variety of barbarism to be found anywhere in our literature”.

“If I wrote about violence in an exaggerated way, it was looking at a future that I imagined would be a lot morevio-lent,” McCarthy said recently. “And it is. Can you remember, 20 years ago, having beheadings on TV? I can’t.”

CORMAC McCARTHY IS A RECLUSE It’s true that McCarthy has given few interviews over the years, but in recent months he has spread himself about like Paris Hilton, appearing on Oprah and talking to Rolling Stone and Time magazines. Perhaps he’s hoping his appearances will deter his most cultish groupies. They obsess over such things as how many times he has mentioned Coca-Cola in his books: 13. There is even a short documentary called Cormac’s Trash, which includes an interview with a woman who had collected several bags of the great writer’s rubbish. They revealed that he likes Häagen-Dazs ice cream. He’s also a good pool-player, likes golf, favours cowboy boots and drives a flat-bed truck. He writes on a typewriter and is working on as many as five novels at a time, publishing whichever he happens to finish first. Despite his reputation for reclusiveness, The New York Times found him “an engaging figure, a world-class talker, funny, opinionated, quick to laugh”. He’s just under 6ft tall and has blue eyes. He doesn’t vote.

CORMAC McCARTHY PREFERS SCIENTISTS TO WRITERS McCarthy doesn’t read fiction, and doesn’t have much time for writers other than Melville, Dostoevsky, Joyce and Faulkner. He doesn’t rate anyone who doesn’t “deal with the issues of life and death”. Writers like Proust and Henry James? “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature.” McCarthy hangs out most days at the Sante Fe Institute, a think-tank for superbrainy boffins. He has no duties, and for many years didn’t even have an office there.

CORMAC McCARTHY IS HOLLYWOOD’S DARLING Billy Bob Thornton directed All the Pretty Horses, starring Matt Damon. Now Joel and Ethan Coen have directed the Oscar-tipped No Country for Old Men. The Road will also be turned into a movie, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron, with John Hillcoat directing.

CORMAC McCARTHY IS NOT AN ALCOHOLIC You’d think, with all that writing about violence and the postapocalypse, McCarthy would be a raging drunk. He used to drink, and Suttree, his most autobiographical novel, describes the pleasures and perils of his drinking life and friends. But he stopped more than 30 years ago. “The friends I have are simply those who quit drinking,” he says. “If there is an occu-pational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”

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