27 works across 28 centuries, back to Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel) and Iliad.
Following one thread, 4 works from No Country for Old Men to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 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.
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.
