Celebrated author of ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’
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.
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced that Mr. McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“For 60 years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement.
Mr. McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, was compared to William Faulkner for his expansive, Old Testament style and rural settings. Mr. McCarthy’s themes, like Faulkner’s, often were 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 Mr. McCarthy’s celebrated “Border” trilogy would learn, dreams of a better life were only dreams, and falling in love an act of folly.
Mr. 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, 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.
“The Road,” his stark tale of a father and son who roam a ravaged landscape, brought him his highest acclaim. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize 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 his ideas, he could trace “The Road” to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, early in the decade.
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.
After “The Road,” little was heard from Mr. McCarthy over the next 15 years and his career was presumed over. But in 2022, Knopf made the startling announcement that it would release a pair of connected novels he had referred to in the past: “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” narratives about a brother and sister, mutually obsessed siblings, and the legacy of their father, a physicist who had worked on atomic technology.
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.
Mr. 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 Mr. McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship — one of the so-called “genius grants” — in 1981.