After searching the area, he comes across a badly wounded Mexican survivor, who pleads with Moss for water, which Moss denies him since he doesn’t have any on him. Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss comes across what appears to be the grisly aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong while out hunting antelope. Bell does not believe himself to be willing to take that risk. He believes in the idea of an agent of destruction that embodies this mentality, one that a man would have to risk his soul confronting. Bell realizes that his worldview is dated, and likely fundamentally different from that of others near the Mexico-US border in 1980. He recalls a time when a man who is now being put to death based on Bell’s own testimony killed a 14 year old girl, and though it was described as a ‘crime of passion’ by investigators, he told Bell there was no passion involved. The novel opens with a monologue from protagonist Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, detailing an experience from his time as a sheriff. In 2009, Cormac McCarthy won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the PEN American Center.The plot of the novel follows the experiences and thoughts of three central characters, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, hunter and Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss, and psychopathic hitman Anton Chigurh, tracing how their paths intersect over the course of a series of highly disturbing and violent events. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. His earlier Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of 100 best English-language books published between 19, and he placed joint runner-up for a similar title in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.

He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He has written twelve novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres and has also written plays and screenplays. Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright.

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