What is "suttree"

Suttree is a semi- autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River. The novel has a fragmented structure with many flashbacks and shifts in grammatical person. Suttree has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and called "a doomed version" of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Suttree was written over a 20-year span and is a departure from McCarthy's previous novels, being much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps his most humorous.