The Crossing was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, on 12 June 1994. The second volume of the Border Trilogy, it tells a very different story from All the Pretty Horses — darker, more philosophical, and structurally more complex. Where the first novel was a coming-of-age romance that subverted its genre, The Crossing is a picaresque pilgrimage through landscapes of loss, populated by storytellers, hermits, and wanderers who deliver parables about fate, God, and the nature of the world.
The Novel
The novel follows Billy Parham on three crossings of the border between New Mexico and Mexico between 1939 and 1945. The first crossing is the most famous: Billy, a sixteen-year-old rancher’s son, traps a pregnant she-wolf that has been killing cattle on his family’s ranch in the Animas Mountains. Rather than kill her, he decides to return her to the mountains of Mexico. The journey south — boy and wolf travelling together through a landscape of extraordinary beauty and casual violence — is one of the great passages in American fiction. The wolf’s fate is devastating.
The second crossing follows Billy’s return to Mexico after discovering that his parents have been murdered. He searches for the horses stolen by their killers, and his journey becomes a series of encounters with characters who tell stories — a blind man in a ruined church, a gypsy, a hermit, an old revolutionary — each of whose narratives circles around questions of God, fate, and whether the world has a moral structure or is governed by pure chance.
The third crossing takes Billy into wartime Mexico with his younger brother Boyd, searching for the stolen horses and for some form of justice. Boyd is wounded, falls in love with a Mexican girl, and eventually disappears into the landscape. Billy returns alone, carrying Boyd’s bones.
Themes and Literary Significance
The Crossing is McCarthy’s most overtly philosophical novel. The interpolated stories — told by characters Billy meets on his journeys — function as moral and metaphysical parables. The blind man’s story of a revolutionary and an old church; the hermit’s account of his brother’s death; the gypsy’s tale of fate — these are not digressions but the novel’s philosophical architecture, building a cumulative argument about the relationship between the stories we tell and the world we inhabit.
The wolf section inaugurates McCarthy’s most sustained engagement with the nonhuman world. The she-wolf is rendered with extraordinary attention — her behaviour, her intelligence, her wildness — and her fate raises questions about humanity’s relationship to the natural world that McCarthy had not previously addressed so directly. The wolf is not sentimentalised; she is dangerous, alien, and beautiful, and her destruction by human violence is presented as a specific instance of a general catastrophe.
Publication History
First edition (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994). Cloth-covered boards with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- “First Edition” stated on copyright page
- Knopf Borzoi colophon
- Full number line including “1”
- Dust jacket with wolf/landscape imagery
Print run: Large — All the Pretty Horses had made McCarthy a bestselling author, and Knopf printed accordingly.
Is The Crossing a Good Investment? Collecting and Market Values
The Crossing is collected as part of the Border Trilogy and as a standalone achievement. Signed copies are particularly prized.
First edition, first printing (1994, Knopf):
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $150–$400
- Near Fine in jacket: $80–$200
- Very Good in jacket: $40–$100
- Without jacket: $10–$25
- Signed first edition: $1,000–$3,000
- Border Trilogy signed boxed set: $5,000–$10,000
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 5x appreciation for signed copies.
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation expected, particularly for signed copies. The novel’s growing reputation as McCarthy’s most philosophically ambitious work supports collector interest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I read this without reading All the Pretty Horses? Yes. The novels share a setting and some thematic concerns but have different protagonists and different narratives. The Crossing works powerfully as a standalone novel.
What happens to the wolf? The wolf is taken from Billy by Mexican authorities and forced to fight dogs for entertainment. Billy kills her to end her suffering. The scene is one of the most emotionally devastating in McCarthy’s entire body of work.
Is this better than All the Pretty Horses? Many McCarthy scholars regard The Crossing as the superior novel — deeper, more complex, more formally ambitious. But it is also more demanding, and readers who prefer narrative momentum to philosophical digression may find it less engaging than the more accessible first volume.