What made Cormac McCarthy such a great writer

Novelist Cormac McCarthy, who died on Tuesday at his home in New Mexico, didn’t achieve mainstream success until the publication of “All the Pretty Horses,” when he was 58 years old.

Though it took the public a while to recognize his immense talent, many of his fellow writers had already been keenly aware of his gifts. After McCarthy’s first novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” was published in 1965, Ralph Ellison raved that the young author was a “writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly – envied.”

Bill Hardwig, an English professor at the University of Tennessee, writes that it was McCarthy’s fearless approach to experimentation that set him apart. Pointing to two of McCarthy’s most beloved works, “Blood Meridian” and “The Road,” Hardwig highlights McCarthy’s versatility, which demonstrates the author’s “love of words and the endless possibilities of language.”

This week we also liked articles about how colonialism can still determine where plant specimens are located, how taste buds respond when you eat a lot of sweet stuff and hip-hop’s global reach.