Cormac McCarthy, the revered novelist whose bleakly violent, apocalyptic visions of the American south drew him fans from Oprah Winfrey to Saul Bellow, has died at the age of 89.
McCarthy died in his home of natural causes. His son John confirmed the death.
Widely seen as one of the US’s greatest novelists, McCarthy was best known for The Road, the 2006 post-apocalyptic novel about a journey taken by a father and his son. Other critically acclaimed books by McCarthy are All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, both of which were turned into films. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, in 2007, dominated that year’s Academy Awards and won best picture, while the 2009 film of The Road was also well received.
Other authors shared their thoughts on the death of their contemporary. Stephen King wrote on Twitter: “Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, McCarthy chronicled – in pared-back, dense, austere prose that prompted comparisons with authors including Herman Melville and William Faulkner – the violent lives of troubled characters. These ranged from No Country for Old Men’s Llewelyn Moss, who steals a case full of money from a scene of violent death near the Rio Grande and finds himself hunted, to the unnamed father and son in The Road, who walk a post-apocalyptic American hellscape peopled with cannibals and rapists.
For John Banville, McCarthy was an “extraordinary novelist, one of the very finest at work today, in America and in the wider world”, whose “work stands proud of the literary landscape, like one of those majestic, sharp-shadowed buttes in Monument Valley, though his colours can be as delicate as the palest shades of the Painted Desert”.
Saul Bellow, who chose him as a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1981, praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”, while the literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian “not only the ultimate western” but “the ultimate dark dramatisation of violence”, placing him alongside three other contemporaries he said had touched the sublime: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.
McCarthy gave few interviews, with details about his life sparse for decades. He grew up outside Knoxville, Tennessee, dropped out of the University of Tennessee, and joined the US air force for four years before going back to university, dropping out again, and beginning to write novels in 1959. His 1965 debut The Orchard Keeper, written while he worked as an auto mechanic and living in poverty, told of a young boy in rural Tennessee, and the outlaw who has killed his father. It was followed by novels including 1968’s Outer Dark, in which a woman has her brother’s child; 1973’s Child of God, about a serial killer in the hill country of east Tennessee; and the semi-autobiographical Suttree in 1979, which was often described as his funniest novel.
It was in 1985, with Blood Meridian, that McCarthy found critical acclaim. Based on real events on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1950s, it follows the story of a 14-year-old Tennessean who finds himself in a world where Native Americans are being murdered. The New York Times said it “may be the bloodiest book since the Iliad” in a rare piece which included an interview with the novelist.
“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the paper. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
From early, McCarthy’s style was instantly recognisable: sparse, often entirely omitting punctuation and using polysyndeton – inserting conjugations to slow the rhythm of his language – to create a sombre, melancholic tone. He credited Melville, Dostoevsky and Faulkner as formative, while professing his indifference to authors who didn’t “deal with issues of life and death”.
His 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses was the first in the Border trilogy, which chronicled the lives of two cowboys working on the US-Mexico frontier. The novel won the National Book Award and widespread fame for McCarthy, while the second, The Crossing, in 1994, and the concluding volume, Cities of the Plain, in 1998, were also acclaimed.
McCarthy wrote a play, The Stonemason, in 1994, then turned his 1984 screenplay No Country for Old Men into a novel in 2005; the Coen brothers adapted the bleak tale into an Oscar-winning film in 2007. That same year, McCarthy won the Pulitzer prize for his 2006 novel The Road, a book he credited to the arrival of his second son, John Francis, in 2004 when the author was in his late 60s. In his first ever television interview, with Oprah Winfrey in 2007, he said he hoped readers of The Road would take away the message that they should “simply care about things and people and be more appreciative. Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad. We should be grateful.”
McCarthy had more success with other people’s adaptations of his work than his own screenplays. But unlike No Country for Old Men, his 2011 screenplay for the HBO film The Sunset Limited – originally a play – was not widely distributed or seen, while an adaptation of his 1984 screenplay The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender, was alternately panned as one of the worst films of 2013, and praised for being “deliberately unobvious”.
In 2009, a Texas university acquired McCarthy’s 98-box archive, which revealed that McCarthy was then working on three novels. More than a decade later, two of them were released in 2022: The Passenger and Stella Maris, two connected novels that follow Bobby and Alicia Western, two siblings who are tormented by the legacy of their physicist father, who helped develop the atom bomb.
The author married three times and lived in Spain and Texas for many years before settling in New Mexico, where he lived for three decades.
Asked by Winfrey in 2007 if he cared that he had millions of readers, he said: “In all honesty I have to say I really don’t. You would like for the people who appreciate the book to read it but as far as many, many people reading it, so what? It’s OK. Nothing wrong with it.”
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