27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
Following one thread, 6 works from No Country for Old Men to Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Back to all 27 works
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
