Cormac McCarthy, the celebrated American novelist, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, McCarthy moved with his family as a child to Knoxville, Tennessee.
McCarthy’s first novel, ‘The Orchard Keeper,’ was published in 1965 to resounding acclaim. Set in McCarthy’s own Tennessee, ‘The Orchard Keeper’ drew comparisons to the works of William Faulkner and won a notable first novel award from the William Faulkner Foundation.
In 1976, with three novels under his belt, McCarthy moved from Tennessee to El Paso, Texas, where he would live for the next two decades. In 1981, he traveled across the American Southwest on a MacArthur Grant to prepare for a spate of novels set in the region.
The first of these Western novels, ‘Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West,’ was published in 1985 and slowly developed into a major critical success. One New York Times review described it as “the bloodiest book since the Iliad.” Scholar and critic Harold Bloom called it “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.”
Nonetheless, neither ‘Blood Meridian’ nor any of McCarthy’s earlier books sold well, and he lived on modest means in El Paso during this period. A 1992 profile in The New York Times — based on McCarthy’s first ever interview with the press — described him as perhaps “the best unknown novelist in America.”
That same year, however, McCarthy had his first major breakthrough with ‘All the Pretty Horses,’ a romantic Western about a teenager who sets off from the Texas ranch where he was raised following his grandfather’s death, hoping to become a cowboy in Mexico. ‘All the Pretty Horses’ won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, spawning a trilogy that included ‘The Crossing’ (1994) and ‘Cities of the Plain’ (1998).
McCarthy’s next major work, ‘No Country for Old Men,’ was released in 2005 and set in the 1980s in Terrell County, Texas. In line with McCarthy’s original intentions, the novel was adapted into a blockbuster film starring Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, and Tommy Lee Jones.
‘The Road,’ perhaps McCarthy’s best-known novel, followed one year later and was likewise adapted into a motion picture starring Viggo Mortensen. ‘The Road’ is a post-apocalyptic tale centering on the relationship between a father and a son.
McCarthy did not release another novel for 16 years when the connected pair ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’ were published in tandem late in 2022. By the end of the year, they had sold over 100,000 copies.
Enamored with the southwestern landscapes that colored many of his novels, McCarthy moved from Texas to New Mexico in the late 1990s. He died Tuesday of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, aged 89. Upon his death, Stephen King recalled McCarthy as “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time.”
In addition to the prestigious MacArthur fellowship and the awards garnered by ‘All the Pretty Horses,’ McCarthy earned the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2007 for ‘The Road.’
