The Border Trilogy consists of three novels written by American author Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road...

: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing

The Crossing (novel)

The Crossing is a novel by prize-winning American author Cormac McCarthy, published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf. The story is the second installment of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy".-Plot introduction:...

, and Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain

Cities of the Plain is the final volume of American novelist Cormac McCarthy's "Border Trilogy", published in 1998. A film adaptation to be directed by Andrew Dominik has been announced for release in 2012...

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Although originally published as three separate novels, the books taken as whole have an architecture that sets the trilogy apart from the individual volumes. The romanticism explored in All the Pretty Horses, all but completely negated by the end of the novel, is even further desolated by the end of the trilogy. The despair and despoliation evident in Cities of the Plain takes on considerably more weight when read at the cumulative end of the series, and the losses that pervade The Crossing are heightened by the greater loss of an entire way of life rendered in the final novel.