Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

First edition cover
Author	Cormac McCarthy
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Western, historical novel, Postmodern novel
Publisher	Random House
Publication date	April 1985
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	337 pp (first edition, hardback)
ISBN	(first edition, hardback)
OCLC	234287599
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Class	PS3563.C337 B4 1985

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic Western (or anti-Western)novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.

The majority of the narrative follows a teenager referred to only as "the kid," with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of sheer compulsion. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a physically massive, highly-educated member of the gang depicted as completely bald from head to toe.

Although the novel initially generated only lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's masterpiece as well as one of the greatest American novels of all time.Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian while living on the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellows grant. It is his first novel set in the Southwestern United States, a change from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work. In his essay for the Slate Book Review from 5 October 2012 entitled "Cormac McCarthy Cuts to the Bone", Noah Shannon summarizes the existing library archives of the first drafts of the novel as dating to the mid-1970s. The review includes digital archive images of several of McCarthy's own type-script pages for early versions of the novel.