Description:

Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, over a four-year period starting in 1950, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River. The novel has a fragmented structure with shifts in grammatical person and has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and called "a doomed Huckleberry Finn" by Jerome Charyn. McCarthy's Suttree was written over a 20-year span and is a departure from McCarthy's previous novels -- much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps his most humorous.