Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy has passed. His publisher said that the 89-year-old author of “No Country for Old Men” and other masterpieces died of old age at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He was the author of “All the Pretty Horses,” and “The Road.” “No Country for Old Men,” was made into a movie in 2007.
Born in 1933 in Tennessee, he studied at the University of Tennessee, but dropped out and joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953. He was stationed in the Territory of Alaska for two years, where he started as a navigator but ended up hosting a nighttime radio show on base at Elmendorf AFB, where he spun records on turntables.
His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” was written while he was working as an auto mechanic in Chicago, was published in 1965, and won the prestigious Faulkner Award.
He was a recluse and his writings depicted a dark and bleak side of America — and an extremely violent side.
“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. “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 was born in Knoxville, Tenn., and lived in various places in the Great Smoky Mountains before moving to Santa Fe.
Other novels he wrote were include “Outer Dark,” 1968; “Child of God,” 1973; “Suttree,” 1979; and “Blood Meridian,” 1985.
His “Border Trilogy,” set along the U.S. border with Mexico, includes “All the Pretty Horses,” 1992; “The Crossing,” 1994, and “Cities of the Plain,” 1998.
Photo: Cormac McCarthy, inside flap of “Suttree,” Wikimedia Commons.
