Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy (born July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island), is an American novelist who has written ten novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres.Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville.

This compelling novel has as its protagonist Cornelius Suttree, living alone and in exile in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River close by Knoxville. He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals and the poverty-stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humour enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity. '"Suttree" contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor' - "Times Literary Supplement". '"Suttree" marks McCarthy's closest approach to autobiography and is probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of his books' - Stanley Booth. 'The book comes at us like a horrifying flood. The language licks, batters, wounds - a poetic, troubled rush of debris ...Cormac McCarthy has little mercy to spare, for his characters or himself. His text is broken, beautiful and ugly in spots..."Suttree" is like a good, long scream in the ear' - Jerome Charyn, "New York Times".