Cornelius Suttree, descendant of a distinguished Tennessee family, lives in a houseboat on the Tennessee River, among the drunks and outcasts of 1950s Knoxville. Cormac McCarthy wrote this for twenty years and published it in 1979, four hundred pages of prose so dense and beautiful that every sentence requires attention. The novel is McCarthy's Ulysses, his Leopold Bloom a man who has renounced respectability to live among the dying. Death is everywhere. So is humor. The language itself seems to glow.