In this brilliant study, Allen Josephs contends there are five epochal writers in American literature: Melville and Twain, Hemingway and Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy. More importantly, in the same way that there would have been no Hemingway without Twain, no Faulkner without Melville, so without the four of them, there would have been no Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy himself has commented that all books are made from other books. Here Josephs looks back at McCarthy in terms of his epochal predecessors, and in this way shows that McCarthy is not merely within the American literary tradition, not merely a part of it, but that in fact he is a kind of intentional summa of that tradition.