Why did Cormac McCarthy write The Road in the style he did?

Cormac McCarthy

PERSONAL LIFE
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence in 1933, Rhode Island and was one of six children within the family. McCarthy studied at the University of Tennessee from 1951-52 and 1957-59 but never graduated from his course.

After marrying a fellow student on his course Lee Holleman in 1961, he and she 'moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside Knoxville' They had a son, Cullen, in 1962. This son would become influential throughout The Road.

INTERVIEWS WITH McCARTHY

In one of his few interviews with The New York Times,McCarthy reveals that he is 'not a fan of authors who do not deal with issues of life and death'. He continued to say 'To me that is not literature . A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange'.

In 2006, McCarthy made his first appearance on television with an interview with Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Winfrey Show.  During the interview he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road. McCarthy told Oprah that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks."

FAMILY
Children

• Cullen McCarthy (Model for The Road)
• John Francis McCarthy

Marriages

• Lee Holleman (1961) Divorced
• Annie De Lisle (1967 Divorced 1981)
• Jennifer Winkley (2007 -

Novels

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Dark (1968)
• Child of God (1973)
• Suttree (1979)
• Blood Meridian of the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
• All the Pretty Horses (1992)
  1st Part in trilogy
• The Crossing (1994)
  2nd part in trilogy
• Cities of the Plain (1998)
  3rd part in trilogy
• No Country for Old Men (2005)
• The Road (2006)
• The Passenger (forthcoming)

Short Fiction

• Wake for Susan (1959)
• A Drowning Incident (1960)

Screen Plays

• The Gardener's Son (1976)
• The Counsellor (2013)

WHY WOULD THIS HELP ME?
Looking back on McCarthy's life, we can view which moments in his life helped to shape The Road; his son was the model for The Boy in The Road; the lack of punctuation comes from his son who stated there is 'no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks.'

• According to Mr Smith, the contextual evidence of McCarthy IS ASSESSED IN QUESTION 1B,