Despite or even because of the surface accessibility of the Trilogy, Nell Sullivan identifies “gender issues. This first installment of The Border Trilogy marked a “thematic shift away from atavistic violence and iconoclastic characters” (Owens 2000, xviii) and thus appeared more accessible than his earlier works. With the publication of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy again escaped clear-cut labeling. In accordance with his intangibility, Cormac McCarthy is sometimes called a writer of Westerns, at other times he is received as a novelist of the Southern Gothic like Harry Crews or Barry Hannah (Flora 1993, 9). No literary style or region can claim Cormac McCarthy as its own, and the author himself does not place himself with any such literary style or region. Yet just as many scholars consider the author a Southern expatriate like Bobbie Ann Mason or Alice Adams (Flora, 9). As for his regional affiliation, McCarthy is sometimes regarded as an Appalachian writer and thus grouped with authors like “Lisa Alther, John Ehle, Gail Goodwin, William Hoffman, Jane Anne Phillips, Mary Lee Settle, Lee Smith, and John Yount” (Flora 1993, 3). Scholars compare his style to that of William Faulkner – as either disciple (Bloom 2000, 254) or imitator (Noble 1985, 580) – and place him in the tradition of James Joyce or Herman Melville. These days, the author is hailed as one of the great American novelists, standing “among the finest living craftsmen of the American language” (Mills 1993, 286). Since then, recognition of Cormac McCarthy has come a long way. Guillemin had begun researching Cormac McCarthy in the 1990s, and he recounted a little wistfully how everybody back then automatically assumed he meant Senator Joseph when he spoke of studying McCarthy.

Georg Guillemin recalled hosting the first European conference on Cormac McCarthy in 1998, also at the John-F.-Kennedy Institute Berlin. In his introductory remarks at the international symposium on Cormac McCarthy, “Crossroads and Transgressions: Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds” (2016), Dr.

Cormac mccarthy's all the pretty horses