The fact that McCarthy has had four of his books turned into movies would have put him on most readers' radar sooner or later. Oprah probably did not even know about Cormac in 2000 when the movie adaptation of his 1992 novel,
All the Pretty Horses, was made. The Coen brothers turned
No Country for Old Men into an Oscar winning film in 2007. According to Wikipedia, the novel originated from an unsold screenplay. Good writing always surfaces from anonymity, with or without recommendations from people like Oprah. Her choice of
The Road was not even his best book. She was getting on the bandwagon at the time. We should thank Billy Bob Thornton as the first big name "discoverer." Others knew about McCarthy even earlier:
[But] among a small fraternity of writers and academics, McCarthy has a standing second to none, far out of proportion to his name recognition or sales. A cult figure with a reputation as a writer's writer, especially in the South and in England, McCarthy has sometimes been compared with Joyce and Faulkner. Saul Bellow, who sat on the committee that in 1981 awarded him a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, exclaims over his "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences." Says the historian and novelist Shelby Foote: "McCarthy is the one writer younger than myself who has excited me. I told the MacArthur people that he would be honoring them as much as they were honoring him."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/1...thy-venom.html