Cormac McCarthy, The Road and No Country for Old Men author, dies at 89
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Cormac McCarthy, one of the most celebrated American novelists of recent decades, died Tuesday of natural causes in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89.
Widely compared to such giants as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, McCarthy forged a unique style that blended sparse punctuation with eloquent meditations on the darkness of the human spirit.
His work found both mainstream and critical success. All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award, and The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize, were best-sellers, and No Country for Old Men became an Oscar-winning movie by the Coen brothers. Blood Meridian, famous for its horrific violence, was declared the “ultimate Western” by famed literary scholar Harold Bloom and is often ranked by critics as one of the best American novels of the later 20th century.
McCarthy published his final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, two months apart, in October and December 2022.
“Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,” Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, said in a statement Tuesday. “For sixty years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word. Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.”
McCarthy rarely worked in the same genre twice, moving from Southern Gothic to Western to post-apocalyptic, but his work typically focused on male protagonists isolated from the rest of human civilization — Cornelius Suttree living alone on his houseboat in Suttree, for example, or the father-son duo wandering the ruins of The Road.
Given McCarthy’s reluctance to make public appearances, teach classes, or give interviews, it was easy for some observers to peg him as a loner like his characters. But McCarthy was never isolated from civilization, just from media.
“I’ll keep on my side of the fence and you stay on yours,” he told Oprah Winfrey during one of his rare interviews (Winfrey had chosen The Road as one of her book club titles). He preferred the company of scientists to that of fellow writers and was a longtime fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank for theoretical science.
Some aspects of McCarthy’s life did show up in his work from time to time. He was born in Providence in 1933, but his family moved to Knoxville, Tenn., soon after. He attended the University of Tennessee for a few years and married fellow student Lee Holleman.
The couple moved to a shack outside Knoxville with no heat or running water, and though Holleman eventually despaired of the situation and moved to Wyoming (the first of McCarthy’s three divorces), the experience clearly shaped McCarthy’s celebrated novel Suttree and the protagonist’s life on a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River.
McCarthy later moved to Santa Fe, eloquently capturing the landscapes of the American Southwest in works like Blood Meridian. His second son, John, was born when the author was in his 60s, and their relationship formed the basis for The Road (McCarthy said much of the book’s dialogue was lifted from their conversations).
Much of McCarthy’s work is pervaded by a sense of the apocalyptic, both literal and figurative. The world of The Road has been devastated by some unknown cause, while characters like No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh or Blood Meridian’s fearsome Judge become living manifestations of nihilistic violence.
McCarthy had an unparalleled ability to stare into the darkness of the human soul, and what he saw there became the foundation for much of his work. “Creative work is often driven by pain,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. “It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything.”
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