This content is from Wikipedia. We do not consider this content professional or citable. Please use your discretion when relying on it. GradeSaver also offers a professionally written study guide by one of our staff editors.

Literary significance and criticism

The Road has received numerous positive reviews and honors since its release. The review aggregator Metacritic reported the book had an average score of 90 out of 100, based on 31 reviews.^[2] Critics have deemed it "heartbreaking", "haunting", and "emotionally shattering".^[3][4][5] The Village Voice referred to it as "McCarthy's purest fable yet".^[3] In a New York Review of Books article, author Michael Chabon heralded the novel. Discussing the novel's relation to established genres, Chabon insists The Road is not science fiction: although "the adventure story in both its modern and epic forms… structures the narrative", Chabon says, "ultimately it is as a lyrical epic of horror that The Road is best understood".^[6] Entertainment Weekly in June 2008 named The Road the best book, fiction or non-fiction, of the past 25 years, ahead of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Toni Morrison's Beloved.^[7]

On March 28, 2007, the selection of The Road as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club was announced. A televised interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show was conducted on June 5, 2007 and it was McCarthy's first, though he had been interviewed for the printed media before.^[8] The announcement of McCarthy's television appearance surprised those who follow him. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor", said John Wegner, an English professor at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, when told of the interview.^[9]

British environmental campaigner George Monbiot was so impressed by The Road that he declared McCarthy to be one of the "50 people who could save the planet" in an article published in January 2008. Monbiot wrote, "It could be the most important environmental book ever. It is a thought experiment that imagines a world without a biosphere, and shows that everything we value depends on the ecosystem".^[10] This nomination echoes the review Monbiot had written some months earlier for the Guardian in which he wrote, "A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small Is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world".^[11]

Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks has indicated that The Road influenced the development of the Bethesda video game Fallout 3.^[12]

Awards and nominations

On April 16, 2007, the novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[13] It also won the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.^[14]