All the Pretty Horses

Summary

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy’s sixth novel, is a cowboy odyssey for modern times. Set in the late 1940s, it features the travels and toils of a sixteen-year-old East Texan named John Grady Cole, caught in the agonizing purgatory between adolescence and adulthood.

At the start of the novel, Cole’s grandfather has just died, his parents have permanently separated, and the family ranch, upon which he had placed so many boyish hopes, has been sold. Rootless and increasingly restive, Cole leaves Texas, accompanied by his friend Lacey Rawlins, and begins a journey across the vaquero frontier into the badlands of northern Mexico

In spite of its hard realities and spare storytelling, All the Pretty Horses is a lyrical and richly romantic story, chronicling the erosion of the frontier—and the loss of an era.