John Wesley, who believes his father was a hero, is unaware that his uncle Ownby has been guarding the corpse, and Ather himself has no idea whose body he has been honoring. The story's ironies grow more complex when Sylder defends the boy against his own nemesis, the bullying sheriff's deputy Legwater, and John Wesley comes to regard the dashing Sylder as his hero; the bootlegger, in turn, has no idea that the man he had murdered and dumped in the spray pit was John Wesley's father" (Priola, Orchard 1). .
Before The Outer Dark was published in 1968, McCarthy received a traveling fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. He used this money to leave America on the Sylvania, with the intentions on visiting the home of his Irish ancestors (King Cormac McCarthy built Blarney Castle). (Priola, Cormac 2). While he was away on his trip he met a young dancer/singer who worked on the ship named Anne DeLisle, who became McCarthy's second wife. They married in England in 1966. .
Cormac was given another grant in 1966, the Rockefeller Foundation Grant (1966 - 1968), and him and Anne toured southern England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain. They settled on the island of Ibiza, and McCarthy completed the revisions of his second book, The Outer Dark. In 1967, Anne and Cormac moved back to the states and back to Tennessee at a town near Knoxville called Rockford. (Priola, Cormac 2).
"The book begins with the birth of a child, the product of an incestuous relationship between Culla Holme and his sister, Rinthy. They live in the mountainous recesses of Johnson County (no state is named), and after the baby is born, following long labor, Culla takes the child deep into the woods and leaves it to die. He tells Rinthy the child was sickly and died naturally, but Rinthy refuses to believe Culla. She becomes convinced that her brother has given or traded the child to an itinerant tinker who had come to the cabin shortly before the birth.
