In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.

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.