Cormac McCarthy Dies: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Of ‘No Country For Old Men,’ ‘The Road’ & ‘Blood Meridian’ Was 89

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Cormac McCarthy, generally considered one of America’s greatest living authors, has died. His death was confirmed by his son, John McCarthy. He was 89.

McCarthy is best known for books such as Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West; The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and No Country For Old Men, which was adapted into the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning film.

His other published works include The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of Dark, Suttree, All the Pretty Horses – which won the National Book Award – The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country were adapted for film by Billy Bob Thornton, John Hillcoat and Joel and Ethan Coen, respectively.

McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal that No Country for Old Men was originally a screenplay, but failed to gain traction in that form. “In fact, they said, ‘That will never work.’ Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel,” he recalled. The author later attended the Academy Awards with the Coens in 2008 where their take on the book won Best Adapted Screenplay. The Coens’ No Country won four Academy Awards total that year, including Best Picture.

Deadline last month exclusively reported that Hillcoat is set to direct Blood Meridian for New Regency. The sprawling novel is widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature. Published in 1985, Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is an epic tale of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion which brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of a 14-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. A central figure in the book is the enormous, pale, hairless Judge Holden, whom McCarthy described as a “grotesque patchwork of up-river Kurtz and Milton’s Satan.”

Literary critic Harold Bloom was among the book’s first proponents, calling it “sublime” and “worthy of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.” William Dalrymple – and many others – have held Blood Meridian up as “the great American novel.” The New York Times and Bloom both described McCarthy’s prose in the book as “Faulknerian.” In fact, his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award. However, Blood Meridian’s sprawling, unorthodox nature led many to consider it unfilmable.

Among those who have attempted to adapt the book are Ridley Scott, William Monahan and James Franco. An adaptation of McCarthy’s Child of God was later directed by Franco and starred Tim Blake Nelson. Scott ended up directing McCarthy’s The Counselor in 2013, which was shot from McCarthy’s first original screenplay for the big screen. 

The author and his son, John, are executive producers on the planned adaptation of Blood Meridian.

Notoriously press-shy, McCarthy granted few interviews. In 1992 he told The New York Times, “Of all the subjects I’m interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn’t. Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.”

Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy’s The Road as the April 2007 selection for her massively-popular Book Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview. In the conversation, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show, McCarthy told Winfrey that he did not know any writers and much prefers the company of scientists. He also spoke about how his son inspired the post apocalyptic father-son journey depicted in The Road.

McCarthy later adapted his play The Sunset Limited into a screenplay for Tommy Lee Jones to direct and exec produce. Jones starred in the 2011 HBO project, opposite Samuel L. Jackson.

His books have been published in 48 territories across the globe.

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