- Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, "The Orchard Keeper" is an early classic from one of America"s finest and most celebrated authors. It tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy"s father. Cormac McCarthy"s debut novel is a magnificent evocation of an American landscape, and of a lost American time. "The feeling for the land and seasons is so intense as to be part of the story and there are scenes one will never forget...A complicated and evocative exposition of the transience of life" - "Harper"s". "A true American original" - "Newsweek".