He kept a house in Mexico City where his wife lived. He ran upwards of a thousand head of cattle on this land. He was forty-seven years old and he was the first male heir in all that new-world lineage to attain such an age. La Purísima was one of very few ranches in that part of Mexico retaining the full complement of six square leagues of land allotted by the colonizing legislation of 1824 and the owner, Don Héctor Rocha y Villareal, was one of the few hacendados who actually lived on the land he claimed, land that had been in his family for 170 years. In the lakes and in the streams were species of fish not known elsewhere on earth and birds and lizards and other forms of life as well, all long relict here, for the desert stretched away on every side. The western sections ran into the Sierra de Anteojo to elevations of nine thousand feet but south and east the ranch occupied part of the broad barrial or basin floor of the bolson and was well watered with natural springs and clear streams and dotted with marshes and shallow lakes or lagunas. The Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción was a ranch of fourteen thousand hectares situated along the edge of the Bolsón de Cuatro Ciénagas in the state of Coahuila. To read every Esquire story ever published, upgrade to All Access. The shift in style paid off, netting McCarthy the National Book Award and bringing him a new level of public attention (not that the notoriously reclusive author craved the spotlight).

At once a coming-of-age story and an elegy for a lost way of life, the novel's romanticism was a sharp contract to McCarthy's characteristically bleak fiction. When Grady is displaced by the sale of his ancestral home, he rides into Mexico to find work as a cowboy for hire. The first volume in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is the story of 16-year-old John Grady Cole, the last in a long line of Texas ranchers. Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, excerpted in the March 1992 issue of Esquire, marked a new chapter in the career of a writer already recognized as one of America's finest storytellers.

All the pretty horses book cover