You call forth the world which God has formed and that world only. Nor is this life of yours by which you set such store your doing, however you may choose to tell it. Its shape was forced in the void at the onset and all talk of what might otherwise have been is senseless for there is no otherwise. Of what could it be made? Where be hid? Or how make its appearance? The probability fo the actual is absolute. That we have no power to guess it out beforehand makes it no less certain. That we may imagine alternate histories means nothing at all.

He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). In a 2006 poll of authors and publiCormac McCarthyrs conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century Blood Meridian placed third behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld. The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles.

Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books publiCormac McCarthyd between 1923 and 2005 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction publiCormac McCarthyd in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time alongside Don DeLillo Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying". All the Pretty Horses and The Road were also adapted as motion pictures.