The Crossing

Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing is a 1994 coming-of-age Western that explores humanity’s relationship with the frontier through teenager Billy Parham’s journeys during the early 1940s. The novel is the second installment of McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy,” which includes All the Pretty Horses (1992) and Cities on the Plain (1998), although the plot of The Crossing has no connection to the first installment of the trilogy. McCarthy is a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Road (2006) and a Macarthur Fellow and is widely considered one of the greatest American novelists. This guide references the first Vintage International paperback edition of the novel.

Punctuation Note: McCarthy omits nearly all punctuation from his prose except for what he considers necessary. Direct quotations in this guide preserve McCarthy’s omission of apostrophes and other punctuation.

Content Warning: The source text uses offensive terms for Indigenous Americans and Indigenous Mexicans as well as the derogatory term “gypsy” to refer to nomadic peoples. This guide uses updated and accurate terminology, but preserves the original diction of the source text in direct quotes.

Plot Summary

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Parham family lives on their ranch in the Animas Valley of Hidalgo, New Mexico.