The Road (2006) The Road (2006)WRITTEN BY Cormac McCarthy
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN USA
Cormac McCarthy's harrowing book The Road (made into a movie in 2009) is about a man and his son as they wander the earth after an unnamed catastrophe has devastated the environment and destroyed society. The two central characters, referred to simply as “the man” and “the boy,” navigate through the charred remains of a blackened landscape without sun or seasons—an endlessly gray world where there is almost no food, animals, or other humanity. With a shopping cart full of tattered belongings and a gun with only two bullets left (to be used for protection or for suicide if they should get captured), the pair walks south toward the sea, driven by a vague notion that there will be something better there.
The journey to the coast is dangerous. The food supply has dried up to the point that people have become cannibals who capture and imprison other humans, eating them piece by piece. Pregnant women are even held in captivity so that their babies can be a food source. The father tries to teach the son to be decent amid the horrors of their surroundings. But the father becomes ill with a hacking cough and knows he will soon be gone, so his compassion for other innocent stragglers deteriorates as he becomes more concerned about teaching his son to protect himself. The son, however, is determined to remain one of the “good guys” (a concept his father has been trying to instill in him), and in their last weeks together, the boy must now teach his father what it means to be good. The father does eventually die on the beach, and the boy finds a seemingly kind family of vagabonds to take him in.
More Books Written by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
No Country for Old Men (2005)
UNFORGETTABLE MOMENT
When the father and son stumble across a hungry old man walking alone, the boy wants to offer the old man food. But his father has only suspicion and contempt for the old guy and refuses to help him. This is when it dawns on the boy that making sure the pair act in a moral way has become his responsibility. He pressures his father to give the old man a can of fruit, and the fellow joins them for dinner that night.
EALITY FACTOR
McCarthy purposefully doesn't name the cause of the destruction in the book. Most likely, the Earth was destroyed by either a nuclear war or an NEO collision (Near Earth Object, such as a comet or asteroid). These would explain the ash and fire, toxic air and water, and the extinction of all plants and animals. Such an event could depress temperatures around the world, leading to a major loss of food crops and a possible collapse of society, but an awful lot of factors would have to be in place for this to happen.
The InspirationMcCarthy has said that he got inspiration for The Road during a visit to El Paso, Texas, with his young son. There he imagined “fires on the hill” and what the city might look like in the future, if society ended.
The Impact
QUOTABLES 
“You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.”
The man, explaining his actions to his son, immediately after shooting and killing an attacker who threatened the boy at knifepoint
“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
An old straggler named Ely says this to the man, speaking about the possibility of being the last men on Earth