All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy (1992)
“A sixteen-year-old Texan rides into Mexico to find the Old West. He finds love, prison, and the end of everything he believed about himself.”
Short Summary
In 1949, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole loses his family ranch when his grandfather dies and his mother sells the property. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride south across the Rio Grande into Mexico, seeking the cowboy life that no longer exists in Texas. They pick up a younger runaway, Jimmy Blevins, whose recklessness will cost them everything. John Grady finds work on the Hacienda de la Purisima, falls in love with the rancher's daughter Alejandra, and proves himself the finest horseman anyone has seen. But the hacendado's aunt destroys the romance, Blevins murders a man in a distant town, and the Mexican authorities arrest all three Americans. In the prison at Saltillo, John Grady kills a man to survive. He and Rawlins are released through the intervention of Alejandra's great-aunt, who exacts a price: John Grady must never see Alejandra again. He goes back for her anyway. She refuses him. He rides home to Texas with nothing — no ranch, no girl, no friend, no innocence. The horses remain beautiful. They do not care who rides them.
Detailed Summary
All the Pretty Horses opens in San Angelo, Texas, in the autumn of 1949. John Grady Cole is sixteen years old. His grandfather has just died, and his mother — an aspiring actress who never wanted the ranching life — is selling the family property. John Grady's father, broken by the war and a failed ...