Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or Sunset Crimson in the West

Cormac McCarthy is a modern American classic writer of the highest caliber, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and a master of complex emotions and unconventional syntax. He is well known to readers for his novels No Country for Old Men (the Coen brothers' film adaptation of this book won four Oscars), The Road (which won the Pulitzer Prize and was also adapted for the screen), and the Border Trilogy (the first novel of which, Horses, Horses, won the National Book Award and was adapted for the screen by Billy Bob Thornton, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz). But it was his novel Blood Meridian that first made McCarthy famous; it was after this book that he became a household name not only among literary critics but also among the general public. The venerable Englishman John Banville, a Booker Prize winner, called this novel "a kind of cross between Dante's Inferno, The Iliad, and Moby-Dick." The protagonist of Blood Meridian, a fourteen-year-old teenager from Tennessee known only as "the kid," becomes the hero of a new epic based on real events and circumstances of the mid-19th-century Texas-Mexican border, where the Indian scalp market is booming.
Blood Meridian was included in Time magazine's list of the "100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005." In 2006, The New York Times ranked the novel second on its list of the best American prose published in the past 25 years.