Novelist McCarthy dead at 89
Writer of violent, apocalyptic tales found fame late in life
SANTA FE, N.M. — Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who in prose both dense and brittle took readers from the southern Appalachians to the desert Southwest in such novels as “The Road,” “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses,” died Tuesday. He was 89.
McCarthy died of natural causes in Santa Fe, N.M., publisher Alfred A. Knopf said.
McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tenn., was compared to William Faulkner for his Old Testament style and rural settings. McCarthy’s themes, like Faulkner’s, were often bleak and violent and dramatized how the past overwhelmed the present. Across stark and forbidding landscapes and rundown border communities, he placed drifters, thieves, prostitutes and old, broken men, all unable to escape fates determined for them well before they were born.
As the doomed John Grady Cole of McCarthy’s celebrated “Border” trilogy would learn, dreams of a better life were only dreams, and falling in love an act of folly.
McCarthy’s own story was one of belated, and continuing, achievement and popularity. Little known to the public at age 60, he would become one of the country’s most honored and successful writers despite rarely talking to the press.
He broke through commercially in 1992 with “All the Pretty Horses,” and over the next 15 years won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show and saw his novel “No Country for Old Men” adapted by the Coen brothers into an Oscar-winning movie. Fans of the Coens would discover that the film’s terse, absurdist dialogue, so characteristic of the brothers’ work, was lifted straight from the novel.
“The Road,” his stark tale of a father and son who roam a ravaged landscape, brought him his widest audience and highest acclaim. It won the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction and was selected by Winfrey for her book club. In his Winfrey interview, McCarthy said that while typically he didn’t know what generates the ideas for his books, he could trace “The Road” to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, early in the decade. Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night as his son slept, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.
“I just had this image of these fires up on the hill … and I thought a lot about my little boy,” he said.
He told Winfrey he didn’t care how many people read “The Road.”
“You would like for the people that would appreciate the book to read it. But, as far as many, many people reading it, so what?” he said.
McCarthy dedicated the book to his son, John Francis, and said having a child as an older man “forces the world on you, and I think it’s a good thing.” The Pulitzer committee called his book “the profoundly moving story of a journey.”
“It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, ‘each the other’s world entire,’ are sustained by love,” the citation said. “Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.”
In 2022, Knopf made the startling announcement that it would release McCarthy’s first work in more than 15 years, a pair of connected novels he had referred to in the past: “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” narratives on a pair of mutually obsessed siblings and the legacy of their father, a physicist who had worked on atomic technology. “Stella Maris” was notable, in part, because it centered on a female character, an acknowledged weakness of McCarthy’s.
“I don’t pretend to understand women,” he told Winfrey.
His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” — written in Chicago while he was working as an auto mechanic — was published by Random House in 1965. His editor was Albert Erskine, Faulkner’s longtime editor.
Other novels include “Outer Dark,” published in 1968; “Child of God” in 1973; and “Suttree” in 1979. The violent “Blood Meridian,” about a group of bounty hunters along the Texas-Mexico border murdering Indians for their scalps, was published in 1985.
His “Border Trilogy” books were set in the Southwest along the border with Mexico: “All the Pretty Horses” (1992) — a National Book Award winner that was turned into a feature film; “The Crossing” (1994), and “Cities of the Plain” (1998).
McCarthy said he was always lucky. He recalled living in a shack in Tennessee and running out of toothpaste, then going out and finding a toothpaste sample in the mailbox.
“That’s the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen,” said McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship, a “genius grant,” in 1981.