The Orchard Keeper

In rural Tennessee--Cormac McCarthy's home ground--a boy named John Wesley Rattner, whose father has been murdered, teams up with Athel Ownby, an aged man who lives in harmony with the land, to resist the encroachment of the modern world. One of Ownby's peculiarities is the mysterious corpse he keeps in his garden--a corpse that turns out to be meaningful for more than one character in the story. THE ORCHARD KEEPER, McCarthy's first novel (published in 1965), is steeped in the dialect, idioms, and landscapes of Tennessee. It won a Faulkner Award and launched his career as a major voice in American letters.