Cormac McCarthy, lauded author of The Road and No Country for Old Men, dies at 89

Writer Cormac McCarthy attends the premiere of The Road at Clearview Chelsea Cinemas on November 16, 2009 in New York City. Photo / Jim Spellman

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who in prose both dense and brittle took readers from the southern Appalachians to the Southwest desert 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, New Mexico, publisher Alfred A. Knopf said.

McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, was compared to William Faulkner for his Old Testament style and rural settings. McCarthy’s themes, like Faulkner’s, often were bleak and violent and dramatised 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.

Javier Bardem played a determined hitman in the film version of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which became an Oscar hit.

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 honoured 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. 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 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 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 nearby, 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 read in part. “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 centred on a female character, an acknowledged weakness of McCarthy’s.

The grim future depicted in The Road was adapted in a film starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

“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 - one of the so-called “genius grants” - in 1981.

In 2009, Christie’s auction house sold the Olivetti typewriter he used while writing The Road and No Country for Old Men for $254,500. McCarthy, who bought the Olivetti for $50 in 1958 and used it until 2009, donated it so the proceeds could be used to benefit the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research community. He once said he didn’t know any writers and preferred to hang out with scientists.

The Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos purchased his archives in 2008, including correspondence, notes, drafts, proofs of 11 novels, a draft of an unfinished novel and materials related to a play and four screenplays.

McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee for a year before joining the Air Force in 1953. He returned to the school from 1957 to 1959, but left before graduating. As an adult, he lived around the Great Smoky Mountains before moving West in the late 1970s, eventually settling in Santa Fe.

His Knoxville boyhood home, long abandoned and overgrown, was destroyed by fire in 2009.