Making Bombs in the Hinterlands: The Manhattan Project and Regional Displacement in Cormac McCarthy’s <i>The Passenger</i> and <i>Stella Maris</i>

ABSTRACT McCarthy chooses the unfamiliar location of Oak Ridge to weave his novel The Passenger into the modern horror of an atomic age, a new concern in his work as a focus of sustained attention. He also uses the historical moment of the World War II weapons race to return in his last novels to a very familiar theme in his fiction—governmental overreach and its detrimental effects on those less connected to the power hierarchies associated with the government. There are scarcely no bigger governmental initiatives in the nation’s history than the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos projects during World War II, where the government developed world-class laboratories, uranium-enrichment plants, and nuclear bombs and testing facilities out of nothing in some of the most isolated and geographically daunting places in the nation. McCarthy ties the Manhattan Project laboratories in Oak Ridge to a larger story about early twentieth-century social planning and experimentation that led to the displacement of local citizens as seen in the formation of the Great Smokies Mountains National Park, the TVA river-damming projects, and the formation of the Oak Ridge nuclear facility that was a key part of the Manhattan Project in World War II.