27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
2007
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Contemporary American cinema. United States. In English.
The Coen brothers' 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel follows a welder who takes drug money from a massacre site in 1980 West Texas, the killer Anton Chigurh who hunts him, and an aging sheriff who cannot stop either. It follows the novel's plot and dialogue closely and stages it with the spare, suspense-driven style the Coens developed in their earlier crime films.
2005
Cormac McCarthy
Contemporary American. United States. Written in English.
McCarthy's crime novel set in 1980 West Texas, alternating the chase between Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh with first-person monologues by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.
Direct source, well documented.
The film adapts McCarthy's novel closely, keeping its plot, its title, much of its dialogue (including Chigurh's coin-toss scene at the gas station) and Bell's closing account of his dreams. The Coens cut most of Bell's interior monologues and Moss's encounter with the teenage hitchhiker but preserve the novel's decision to have Moss die offscreen.
1996
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
American independent cinema. United States. In English.
Crime film in which a pregnant Minnesota police chief investigates a botched kidnapping-for-ransom arranged by a desperate car salesman.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Fargo's Marge Gunderson, a decent small-town officer surveying the wreckage of a crime scheme she can barely comprehend, anticipates Ed Tom Bell. Both films frame grotesque violence through a sheriff's plain moral bewilderment and set it in a specific regional landscape and dialect.
1985
Cormac McCarthy
Late twentieth-century American. United States. Written in English.
McCarthy's novel of the Glanton gang of scalp hunters on the 1849-50 borderlands, dominated by the philosophizing, apparently unkillable Judge Holden.
Thematic kinship, well documented.
Chigurh descends from Judge Holden: both are near-supernatural killers who explain their violence as the working of fate or necessity. No Country moves Blood Meridian's borderland violence into the 1980 drug trade and asks the same question about whether evil in the region has ever changed.
1984
Film by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
American independent cinema. United States. In English.
The Coens' first feature, a Texas noir in which a bar owner hires a seedy private detective to kill his wife and her lover, with violent misunderstandings following.
Stylistic influence, well documented.
The Coens' first film was already a Texas crime story of a stolen sum, a seedy killer and an aftermath of misread clues. No Country returns to that setting and to the slow, nearly wordless suspense sequences of Blood Simple, such as the long scenes of characters waiting in darkened rooms; Carter Burwell scored both.
Structural model, probable.
Fargo reworks Blood Simple's design: a man hires killers to solve a domestic problem and the plan collapses through incompetence and chance. The Coens carried over the deadpan tone and the habit of letting violence erupt amid flat, ordinary settings.
1972
Film by Sam Peckinpah
New Hollywood. United States. In English.
Peckinpah's crime film in which a paroled robber and his wife flee across Texas toward the Mexican border with stolen money, pursued by gunmen.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Peckinpah's film follows a couple fleeing across Texas toward Mexico with stolen money, ending in a shootout in an El Paso border hotel. Critics have linked No Country's motel gunfights, border crossing and wounded hero to Peckinpah's Texas crime films, and the film is set in the same early-1970s-to-1980 West Texas milieu.
1959
Jim Thompson
Postwar American pulp. United States. Written in English.
Thompson's paperback crime novel about Doc and Carol McCoy's flight to Mexico after a bank robbery.
Direct source, well documented.
Peckinpah's film adapts Thompson's novel, keeping the robbery, the double-crosses and the flight to Mexico. It drops the novel's surreal final section in the criminal haven of El Rey for a more conventional escape.
1957
Film by Ingmar Bergman
Postwar European art cinema. Sweden. In Swedish.
A knight returning from the Crusades plays chess with Death for his life as plague spreads through medieval Sweden.
Disputed link, conjectural.
Reviewers have compared Chigurh's coin tosses, in which victims call heads or tails for their lives, to the Knight's chess game with Death in Bergman's film. McCarthy has not acknowledged the film, so the link rests on the shared figure of Death offering a game of chance.
1934
James M. Cain
Interwar American hardboiled. United States. Written in English.
Short first-person novel in which a drifter and a roadside diner owner's wife murder her husband and then turn on each other.
Direct source, well documented.
The Coens have said James M. Cain was their main model for Blood Simple. The adulterous couple, the murdered husband and the lovers' mutual suspicion follow the pattern of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Jim Thompson worked in the hardboiled mode Cain established: terse first-hand voices, criminal couples bound by money and mistrust, and plots that end in ruin. The Getaway's fugitive husband and wife who come to fear each other echo Cain's lovers.
The line stops here: cain built the plot from newspaper coverage of the 1927 Snyder-Gray murder case and his own journalism.
1929
Dashiell Hammett
Interwar American hardboiled. United States. Written in English.
Hammett's novel in which the Continental Op sets the gangs of a corrupt mining town against one another until the town is soaked in blood.
Direct source, well documented.
The Coens took their title from Red Harvest, where Hammett's Op says that too much killing makes a man go 'blood simple.' The film's corrupt detective and spiraling murders draw on Hammett's view of violence feeding on itself.
The line stops here: hammett drew chiefly on his years as a Pinkerton detective and the pulp magazine Black Mask rather than on identifiable literary models.
1929
William Faulkner
Southern Renaissance. United States. Written in English.
Four-part novel of the decline of the Compson family, told through three brothers' streams of consciousness and a final third-person section.
Stylistic influence, probable.
McCarthy's early novels were edited by Faulkner's editor Albert Erskine and were widely read as Faulknerian. Blood Meridian keeps Faulkner's ornate vocabulary, long periodic sentences and sense of a violent Southern and Western past.
1928
W. B. Yeats
Modernism. Ireland. Written in English.
Poem from The Tower that opens 'That is no country for old men' and imagines an aging speaker leaving the world of the young for the artifice of eternity in Byzantium.
Direct source, well documented.
McCarthy took his title from the first line of Yeats's poem, 'That is no country for old men.' The poem's subject, an aging man estranged from a world given over to the young and to sensual energy, matches Sheriff Bell's sense that he has outlived his country.
The line stops here: yeats's Byzantium draws on Byzantine art and the private symbolic system of A Vision; minor branch here.
1927
Ernest Hemingway
Lost Generation. United States. Written in English.
Short story in which two hired gunmen wait in a diner for a boxer who, when warned, declines to run.
Stylistic influence, probable.
McCarthy's flat, unglossed dialogue and his hired killers come out of Hemingway's manner, and The Killers in particular, with its gunmen menacing ordinary people in a diner, anticipates scenes such as Chigurh's exchange with the gas station proprietor. McCarthy's sparse later style is widely traced to Hemingway.
1884
Mark Twain
Gilded Age. United States. Written in English.
Huck's vernacular first-person account of rafting down the Mississippi with the escaped slave Jim.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Hemingway wrote in Green Hills of Africa that 'all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.' His plain declarative sentences and reliance on vernacular dialogue descend from Twain's vernacular narration.
The line stops here: rooted in Southwestern frontier humor and Twain's ear for spoken dialect; minor branch here.
1851
Herman Melville
American Renaissance. United States. Written in English.
Ishmael's narrative of Captain Ahab's monomaniacal hunt for the white whale, mixing sea adventure, sermon, encyclopedia and stage drama.
Direct source, well documented.
McCarthy named Moby-Dick as his favorite book in his 1992 New York Times interview. Blood Meridian borrows its mixture of epic action and metaphysical speculation, and Judge Holden's monologues echo Ahab's defiant speeches.
1667
John Milton
English Restoration. England. Written in English.
Blank-verse epic of Satan's rebellion and the fall of Adam and Eve.
Disputed link, conjectural.
Critics have read Judge Holden as a Satanic figure in Milton's mold, a fallen intelligence of great eloquence in rebellion against moral order. McCarthy has not confirmed the debt.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Ahab is modeled partly on Milton's Satan, a proud rebel against cosmic authority. Melville annotated his copy of Milton, and Ishmael calls Ahab a figure of Promethean, Satanic defiance.
1611
Anonymous (translation committee)
Jacobean. England. Written in English.
The Authorized Version English translation of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, whose cadences shaped later English and American prose.
Thematic kinship, probable.
Bell's monologues take on a prophetic, lamenting voice close to Ecclesiastes and the prophets in the King James text. His final dream of his father riding ahead carrying fire in a horn into the dark draws on biblical imagery of light in darkness.
Stylistic influence, well documented.
Blood Meridian's long sentences linked by 'and,' its archaic diction and its apocalyptic tone come from the King James Bible. The novel's epigraphs and imagery repeatedly invoke biblical judgment.
Thematic kinship, probable.
The final section culminates in the Easter Sunday sermon at Dilsey's church. The novel sets the Compsons' decline against the biblical Passion week, with its sections dated to Holy Saturday, Good Friday and Easter.
Direct source, well documented.
Moby-Dick takes its characters' names (Ahab, Ishmael, Elijah) and Father Mapple's sermon on Jonah from the King James Bible. Job's Leviathan is a recurring reference for the whale.
c. 1606
William Shakespeare
Jacobean. England. Written in English.
Tragedy of an aged king who divides his realm, is cast out by his daughters and goes mad on the heath.
Direct source, well documented.
Melville read and heavily marked Shakespeare while writing Moby-Dick. Ahab's storm speeches and his scenes with the mad cabin boy Pip echo Lear on the heath with the Fool, and several chapters are laid out as stage drama.
c. 1606
William Shakespeare
Jacobean. England. Written in English.
Tragedy of a Scottish thane who murders his king and is undone by guilt and further killing.
Direct source, well documented.
Faulkner took his title from Macbeth's speech on life as 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.' The first section is narrated by the mentally disabled Benjy.
1587 (2nd ed.)
Raphael Holinshed
Elizabethan. England. Written in English.
Collaborative prose history of the British Isles that served as Shakespeare's chief source for his histories and several tragedies.
Direct source, well documented.
Shakespeare took the story of Macbeth, the witches' prophecies and the murder of Duncan from Holinshed's Chronicles. He combined it with Holinshed's account of the murder of King Duff.
Direct source, well documented.
Holinshed's Chronicles tell the legend of King Leir and his three daughters, one of Shakespeare's sources alongside the older play King Leir. Shakespeare added the tragic ending.
The line stops here: compiled from earlier chronicles such as Hector Boece's Scotorum Historia; minor branch here.
c. 1495
Anonymous
Late medieval. England. Written in Middle English.
Morality play in which Death summons Everyman to account, and all his companions but Good Deeds abandon him.
Thematic kinship, probable.
The film's personified Death, who summons each character to account and leads them away in a final dance, belongs to the medieval morality tradition of Everyman. Bergman drew on late medieval church paintings that share that tradition.
The line stops here: probably translated from the Dutch play Elckerlijc; minor branch here.
c. 95
John of Patmos
Early Christian. Roman Asia Minor. Written in Koine Greek.
Apocalyptic vision of the end of the world, including the opening of the seven seals and the pale horse whose rider is Death.
Direct source, well documented.
Bergman's title and opening narration quote Revelation 8:1, 'And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven.' Revelation's apocalypse supplies the film's frame, and the squire's wife reads from it as Death arrives.
Direct source, well documented.
The New Testament of the King James Bible translates Revelation from Greek, fixing English phrases such as 'the seventh seal' and 'a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.'
c. 50
Seneca
Early Imperial Rome. Imperial Rome. Written in Latin.
Seneca's tragedy of Phaedra's passion for her stepson Hippolytus, full of rhetorical speeches on guilt and pollution.
Stylistic influence, probable.
Macbeth's cry 'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?' echoes Hippolytus's lament in Seneca's Phaedra that no river could cleanse him. Seneca's tragedies of guilt and bloodshed were standard reading in Elizabethan grammar schools.
c. 19 BCE
Virgil
Augustan. Augustan Rome. Written in Latin.
Twelve-book epic of the Trojan Aeneas's wanderings and war in Italy, founding the Roman line.
Structural model, well documented.
Milton took the form of the literary epic from Virgil, and the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost is divided into twelve books like the Aeneid. The descent into the underworld, councils of the gods and catalogs follow Virgilian models.
428 BCE
Euripides
Classical Athens. Classical Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.
Athenian tragedy in which Phaedra's love for Hippolytus leads to false accusation and his death through his father's curse.
Direct source, well documented.
Seneca reworked the plot of Euripides' Hippolytus, though he made Phaedra declare her passion to Hippolytus in person. He replaced Greek choral drama with long rhetorical speeches.
The line stops here: drawn from oral myth of Theseus and Hippolytus with no surviving earlier text.
c. 500 BCE (compiled)
Anonymous
Ancient Israel. Ancient Israel and Babylonian exile. Written in Hebrew.
The scriptures of ancient Israel, including the creation and fall narratives, the wisdom books and the apocalyptic visions of Daniel.
Direct source, well documented.
Milton's plot is the creation and fall narrative of Genesis, expanded with material from the rest of scripture, which he read in Hebrew. The war in heaven and Satan's fall are built from scattered biblical passages.
Direct source, well documented.
The translators rendered the Hebrew scriptures, including Genesis, Job and Ecclesiastes, into English as the Old Testament of the Authorized Version. Much of their wording came through Tyndale's earlier translations.
Direct source, well documented.
John's apocalypse draws its beasts, sealed books and visions of judgment from Daniel and Ezekiel. Nearly every chapter alludes to the Hebrew scriptures.
This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.
c. 750 BCE
Homer
Archaic Greece. Archaic Greece. Written in Ancient Greek.
Epic of the wrath of Achilles during the Trojan War.
Structural model, probable.
Milton opens with an invocation to the Muse and stages the war in heaven with Homeric set pieces. He presents his poem as surpassing 'the wrath of stern Achilles' as a heroic subject.
Structural model, well documented.
Virgil built the second half of the Aeneid on the Iliad, with Aeneas fighting Turnus as Achilles fought Hector. The epic similes, battle catalogs and invocations are taken from Homer.
This is one of the oldest surviving works in its tradition; the line ends here.
