The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men,” Cormac McCarthy, has died. He was 89. According to a statement from his publisher, his son, John McCarthy, confirmed his death by natural causes.
McCarthy’s brutally violent, ethically ambiguous, frequently gloomy tales in which mankind was faced against basic forces, writings that read like a sock to the jaw dulled by a shot of whiskey, were both loved and ridiculed.
McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, the youngest of six children in an Irish Catholic household. McCarthy’s family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, while he was a youngster, where his father worked as a lawyer. “We were considered rich because everyone around us was living in one- or two-room shacks,” McCarthy said in a rare interview with The New York Times.
McCarthy derived much of his literary inspiration for his Southern gothic and neo-Western stories from the South, in the tradition of William Faulkner’s narrative literature. McCarthy’s style is characterized by deceptively simple, declarative sentences, sparse punctuation, dialogue devoid of quotation marks, and frequently lacking attribution.
McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee in the early 1950s but dropped out to join the Air Force. He returned to university after his service and wrote two short tales in the student literary magazine “The Phoenix” before dropping out for good.
In 1965, he wrote “The Orchard Keeper,” which won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for his remarkable first novel. His following three stories, set in Appalachian Tennessee, were significantly influenced by his Southern heritage.
His fifth volume defied convention. “Blood Meridian,” a gory anti-Western that follows a band of scalp hunters across 18th-century Texas, is possibly the best example of McCarthy’s manner and skill.
A 1985 New York Times book review by Caryn James states, “‘Blood Meridian’ hits the reader like a slap in the face, an insult that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West filled with charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps, and a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants.” The fifth novel by Cormac McCarthy is difficult to read, but it is difficult to ignore.
McCarthy first received widespread recognition in 1992 for “All the Pretty Horses,” a best-seller and National Book Award recipient. In 2000, Billy Bob Thornton directed a film adaptation starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. The 2007 film adaptation of McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men,” starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin, garnered him even more popular success.
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The film received four Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and even lured McCarthy to the Oscars ceremony. McCarthy’s first original feature-length script, “The Counselor,” was directed by Ridley Scott and starred Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, and Cameron Diaz in 2013.
McCarthy is best known for his dystopian novel “The Road.” “The Road,” published in 2006, is a gloomy and disturbing story about a man and his young boy traveling across a destroyed landscape devoid of civilization and most life on Earth.
Oprah Winfrey chose the title for her book club in March 2007, and his following broadcast interview on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was the famously press-shy author’s first. McCarthy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction later that year. Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee starred in the 2009 film adaption.
It would be sixteen years before McCarthy would publish again. In late 2022, at the age of 89, he astounded readers with the linked novels “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” a diptych of existential torment.
McCarthy directed his apocalyptic tendency inward, toward the human soul, and peered deeply into the fractured souls of a brother and sister cursed by their shared parentage, brilliance, and forbidden love for one another. McCarthy was married and divorced three times, and he had two sons, Cullen McCarthy and John Francis McCarthy, to whom “The Road” is dedicated.
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