![]() First edition | |
Author | Cormac McCarthy |
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Language | English |
Genre | Autofiction |
Set in | 1950s Knoxville, Tennessee |
Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | May 1979 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Pages | 471 (paperback) |
ISBN | 0-679-73632-8 |
OCLC | 26322333 |
Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, over a four-year period starting in 1950, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River.
The novel has a fragmented structure with many flashbacks and shifts in grammatical person. Suttree has been compared[1] to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and called "a doomed Huckleberry Finn"[2] by Jerome Charyn. Suttree was written over a 20-year span[3] and is a departure from McCarthy's previous novels, being much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps his most humorous.