Blood Meridian
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Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified as an anti-Western and Gothic Western. McCarthy's fifth book, it was pu
Scalping lithograph circa 1850s
One of the epigraphs entails an ancient scalped skull.
Cormac McCarthy in 1980, by which time he had already been working on Blood Meridian for about five years
Edward S. Curtis – Canyon de Chelly (1904)
Great American Novel
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The "Great American Novel" is the term for a canonical novel that generally embodies and examines the essence and character of the United States. The term was coined by John William De Forest in an 18
Blood Meridian
…acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels of all time, with some labelling the work as the Great American Novel. The novel follows a young man who is never directly named, only being referred to as "the kid." The kid was born in Tennessee during the Leonids meteor…
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe is commonly cited as the Great American Novel—John William De Forest saw it as the closest possible novel.
De Forest
James
Philip Roth satirized the term with his 1973 novel The Great American Novel.