He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

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.