After receiving a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, McCarthy published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985.

An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a 14-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.