Cormac McCarthy, born Charles McCarthy in Providence, Rhode Island, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist who has authored ten novels in the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He has also written plays and screenplays. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville.