Cornelius Suttree, son of a respectable Knoxville family, has rejected his background to live on a houseboat on the Tennessee River among drifters, outcasts, and petty criminals on the margins of 1950s society. The novel follows his years on the river - his friendships, his drinking, the deaths of people he cares for - with dark comedy and extraordinary tenderness. McCarthy worked on it for roughly twenty years and considered it among his most personal books.