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Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who took readers from southern Appalachia to New York in such novels as “The Road,” “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses,” died Tuesday. To the desert southwest, the prose is both dense and fragile. He is 89 years old.
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf said McCarthy died of natural causes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
McCarthy grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and has been compared to William Faulkner in his Old Testament style and rural setting. McCarthy’s themes, like Faulkner’s, are often bleak and violent, and dramatize how the past overwhelms the present. Through bleak and forbidding landscapes and run-down frontier communities, he houses homeless people, thieves, prostitutes, and old, broken men, all unable to escape the fate destined for them long before they were born. As the doomed John Grady Cole learned in McCarthy’s famous “Boundaries” trilogy, dreams of a good life are just dreams, and falling in love is folly.
McCarthy’s own story is one of belated, ongoing achievement and popularity. Little known at the age of 60, he would become one of the most respected and successful authors in the country, although he rarely spoke to the media. He had a commercial breakthrough in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses, which went on to win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for the next 15 years, and he was the author of The Oprah Winfrey Show and watched the Brothers make an Academy Award-winning film adaptation of the novel “Old People Without Borders” by Cohen Press. Fans of the Coen Brothers will find that the film’s terse, absurd dialogue is lifted directly from the novel, a hallmark of the brothers’ work.
“The Road,” the stark tale of a father and son roaming a ravaged land, brought him his widest audience and highest acclaim. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was selected by Winfrey for her book club. In an interview with Winfrey, McCarthy said that while he usually doesn’t know what came up with the idea for his book, he can trace “The Road” back to a trip to Egypt, Texas, with his young son in the early 20th century. A trip to El Paso. The son slept nearby, standing at a hotel window in the middle of the night as he began to imagine what El Paso would look like in 50 or 100 years.
“I just saw these images of the fires in the mountains … I thought a lot about my little boy,” he said.
He told Winfrey he didn’t care how many people read The Road.
“You want people who like the book to read it. But, in terms of many, many people reading it, so what?” he said.
McCarthy dedicated the book to his son, John Francis, and said that older people having children “will impose the world on you, and I think that’s a good thing.” The Pulitzer committee called his book ” A moving story of a journey.”
“It boldly imagines a hopeless future, but a father and his son, ‘the whole world of each other,’ is sustained by love,” reads the citation. “Its overall vision is awe-inspiring, and it’s an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best we can be: ultimate destructiveness, hopeless tenacity, and the ability to bring two people together in the face of utter devastation.” Tenderness that survived.”
In 2022, Knopf announced that he would release McCarthy’s first work in more than 15 years, two interconnected novels he has referred to in the past: Passengers and Stella Maris, about a pair of Connected stories of obsessed siblings and the legacy of their father, a physicist who worked on atomic technology. “Stella Maris” stands out in part because of its centrality to female characters, an acknowledged weakness of McCarthy.
“I don’t pretend to understand women,” he told Winfrey.
His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was written while working as an auto mechanic in Chicago and was published by Random House in 1965. His editor was Albert Erskine, Faulkner’s longtime editor.
Other novels include Outer Dark, 1968; Son of God, 1973; and Suttree, 1979. Published in 1985, the violent “Blood Meridian” tells the story of a group of bounty hunters on the Texas-Mexico border who murder Native Americans for their scalps. Bordering Mexico: “All the Pretty Horses” (1992) – National Book Award winner, turned into a feature film; “Crossroads” (1994) and “Plain City” (1998).
McCarthy said he was always lucky. He recalls living in a shack in Tennessee, running out of toothpaste, and going out to find toothpaste samples in the mailbox. “
This is my life. Just when things are really, really bleak, things happen,” said McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981 — one of the so-called “genius awards.”
In 2009, Christie’s auction house sold the Olivetti typewriter he used while writing novels including “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” for $254,500. McCarthy, who purchased Olivetti in 1958 for $50 and used it until 2009, donated it so proceeds benefit the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research group. He has said that he does not know any writers and prefers to be around scientists.
The Southwest Writers Collection at Texas State University at San Marcos purchased his archives in 2008, including letters, notes, drafts, proofs, an unfinished draft of a novel, and a play and Materials related to four screenplays.
McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee for a year before enlisting in the Air Force in 1953. He returned to school from 1957 to 1959, but left before graduating. As an adult, he lived near the Great Smoky Mountains before moving west in the late 1970s, eventually settling in Santa Fe.
His childhood home in Knoxville, long abandoned and overgrown, was destroyed by a fire in 2009.
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