"THE MAJOR ESTHETIC ACHIEVEMENT OF ANY LIVING AMERICAN WRITER"

MCCARTHY, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random House, (1985). Octavo, original half red cloth, original dust jacket. $5000.

First edition of McCarthy's mythic vision of the American West, an exceptional copy in original dust jacket.

Blood Meridian has been compared to the works of Dante, Poe, Melville and Faulkner; Harold Bloom called it "clearly the major esthetic achievement of any living American writer." To fellow novelist Madison Smartt Bell, "McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame… His diction and phrasing come from all over the evolutionary history of English and combine into a prose that seems to invent itself as it unfolds, resembling Elizabethan language in its flux of remarkable possibilities" (New York Times). Here "landscape and existence assume a mythic, phantasmagoric quality… a total repudiation of the romantic versions of the Old West and a projection in their place of nightmare" (Publisher's Weekly). Little noticed at the time of publication, most copies of the first edition were remaindered—this copy, however, bears no remainder mark.

An exceptional fine copy in a fine bright dust jacket.