All the Pretty Horses cover
Romance

All the Pretty Horses

1992310 pagesRomance
Mood
Melancholy, Adventurous
Protagonist
John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old Texan riding into 1949.
Parental Rating
R
Pace
Slow

Themes & atmosphere

Where All the Pretty Horses keeps showing up

One of our editors' lists features this novel.

Also by Cormac McCarthy

All works by Cormac McCarthy →
Common questions

What you might want to know about All the Pretty Horses

The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.

In 1949, a sixteen-year-old Texas ranch boy who has lost his land rides south into Mexico with his best friend and a stray companion, looking for the cowboy life that has all but disappeared.

Yes. All the Pretty Horses is the first novel in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The three books share some characters and explore the American Southwest and northern Mexico in the mid-20th century.

Yes. All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. It was the breakthrough book that brought McCarthy's work to a mass audience after the comparatively obscure Blood Meridian.

All the Pretty Horses was written by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1992 by Vintage Books.

All the Pretty Horses is 310 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.

At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, All the Pretty Horses takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.

All the Pretty Horses is a standalone novel by Cormac McCarthy, not part of a series.

All the Pretty Horses is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.