From Benjamin Kunkel’s review of Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Cormac McCarthy, I learned that McCarthy (a) gave himself the name Cormac and (b) was born in New England to a prosperous Catholic family and lawyer father. At times I think Kunkel is ungenerous to McCarthy’s work—he seems rather obsessed with not just the postwar consumerist context of McCarthy’s novels but the notion that anyone writing in that context needs to have shown evidence of responding to it in his fiction—but overall he does an excellent job of naming and elaborating both the faults critics tend to find in his writing and the virtues that help to explain why it has resonated so powerfully across the decades.