Essay Database

All the Pretty Horses begins with the 1949 funeral of John Grady Cole's grandfather. With his death, John Grady's mother will sell their Texas ranch and move away. There is nothing left in Texas for John Grady, who loves the ranch and idealizes the cowboy's way of life. Only sixteen years old, John Grady runs away from home with his friend Rawlins. On horseback, they head toward the Mexican border, leading the idyllic, storybook life of …

…settlement--a vision shaped and colored by hundreds of Western movies and their depictions of death without blood, and solitary heroic cowboys vanquishing ultimately cowardly villains--in an attempt to recover the true history of the American West, to remove the romantic and heroic veneer from a past of violence and prejudice, of dreams shattered as much as hopes fulfilled. Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses concerns itself with the meeting place between realism and romanticism.