Cormac McCarthy and Suttree's Knoxville

Cormac McCarthy arrived in Knoxville in nineteen thirty-seven at the age of four. His father had taken a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority as a lawyer, and the family settled first in a house in Sequoyah Hills and later on the south side. McCarthy attended Knoxville Catholic High School, enrolled briefly at the University of Tennessee, left, spent time in the Air Force, came back. He lived here, in various conditions, for more than thirty years.

The novel he produced about those years is called Suttree. He wrote it over roughly two decades. It was published in nineteen seventy-nine, his fourth book, and it is unlike anything else in American fiction. Its narrator, Cornelius Suttree, has rejected his upper-middle-class family and taken up residence in a houseboat on the Tennessee River in the early nineteen fifties. He lives among the fishermen, the drunks, the sex workers, the small-time criminals, and the drifters who occupied the McAnally Flats neighborhood along the waterfront, a neighborhood the city was in the process of clearing when McCarthy was writing about it.

The Knoxville of Suttree is specific in its geography. The Gay Street Bridge. The Tennessee River in morning fog. The markets on the edge of downtown. McCarthy mapped it with the precision of someone who had lived it, which he had, at least in partial proximity. The McAnally Flats neighborhood was cleared during the urban renewal of the mid twentieth century. The waterfront was redeveloped. What McCarthy preserved in prose is the only record of what that community looked like from the inside.

McCarthy left Tennessee for the Southwest in nineteen seventy-six and never returned as a permanent resident. He won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for later novels. Suttree is the one that belongs to this river.

A riverfront park on Knoxville's south waterfront carries the name Suttree Landing. The houseboat neighborhood it honors has been gone for decades. The river is the same river.