When the New York Times published the first print interview with Cormac McCarthy in 1992, the author was barely known outside a small group of academics, writers, and devoted readers. None of his previous books sold more than five thousand copies in hardcover. But that same year McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses made the best-seller lists, and over the next two decades, with the publications of such books as No Country for Old Men and The Road, McCarthy became a house hold name. In Cormac McCarthy's Literary Evolutions, Daniel Robert King traces McCarthy's journey form cult figure to literary icon. Drawing extensively on McCarthy's papers and those of Albert Erskine, his editor and devoted advocate at Random House, King investigates the changes that McCarthy's work as a novelist, his writing methods, and the reception of his novels have undergone over the course of his career. Taking several of McCarthy's major novels as case studies, King explores the lengthy process of their composition through multiple drafts and revisions, the signal contributions of the author's agents and publishers, and McCarthy's growing confidence as a writer. This work also reveals the wide range of McCarthy's reading and research as well as key intertextual connections between the novels. Part literary biography, part archival investigation, and part study of print culture, this book is particularly revealing of how one talented writer, properly nurtured by dedicate allies, went on to gain a huge measure of recognition and respect. Book jacket.