About this item
Highlights
- Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed first screenplay, the basis for an Emmy-nominated film--a taut, riveting intergenerational drama of fathers and sons, power, inequality, rage, and violence set in post-Civil War South Carolina.Set in Graniteville, South Carolina, The Gardener's Son is a tale of privilege and hardship, animosity and vengeance brought to life through two families: the Greggs, the wealthy owners of a cotton mill, and their employees the McEvoys, a father and son beset by misfortune.
- Author(s): Cormac McCarthy
- 112 Pages
- Performing Arts, Film
Description
About the Book
A brilliant and brooding piece of writing by the National Book Award-winning author of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, this taut, riveting drama presents the tale of the tangled fates of two families of Graniteville, South Carolina, in the years following World War II. "(McCarthy is) an author to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly--envied".--Ralph Ellison.Book Synopsis
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed first screenplay, the basis for an Emmy-nominated film--a taut, riveting intergenerational drama of fathers and sons, power, inequality, rage, and violence set in post-Civil War South Carolina.
Set in Graniteville, South Carolina, The Gardener's Son is a tale of privilege and hardship, animosity and vengeance brought to life through two families: the Greggs, the wealthy owners of a cotton mill, and their employees the McEvoys, a father and son beset by misfortune. After Robert McEvoy loses his leg in an accident--rumored to have been caused by his nemesis James Gregg, the son of the mill's founder--the angry and bitter young man deserts his job and family.
Two years later, Robert returns. His mother is dying, and his father, the mill's gardener, is confined indoors working the factory line. These intertwined events stoke the slow burning rage McEvoy has long carried, a fury that erupts in a terrible act of violence that ultimately consumes the Gregg family and his own.
Made into an acclaimed film broadcast on PBS in 1976, The Gardener's Son received two Emmy Award nominations and was screened at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals.
From the Back Cover
In the spring of 1975 the film director Richard Pearce approached Cormac McCarthy with the idea of writing a screenplay. Though already a widely acclaimed novelist, the author of such modern classics as The Orchard Keeper and Child of God, McCarthy had never before written a screenplay. Using nothing more than a few paragraphs in the footnotes to a 1928 biography of a famous pre-Civil War industrialist as inspiration, the author and Pearce together roamed the mill towns of the South researching their subject. One year later McCarthy finished The Gardener's Son, a taut, riveting drama of impotence, rage, and ultimately violence spanning two generations of mill owners and workers, fathers and sons, during the rise and fall of one of America's most bizarre utopian industrial experiments. Produced as a two-hour film and broadcast on PBS in 1976, The Gardener's Son received two Emmy Award nominations and was shown at the Berlin and Edinburgh Film Festivals. This is the first appearance of the film script in book form.