Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy died on June 13th, 2023 of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was eighty-nine years old. His death was confirmed by his son, John McCarthy.
McCarthy was one of the world’s most influential and renowned writers, His career spanned nearly six decades and several genres, including fiction and drama. His work has entered the modern canon and won several prestigious literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Born in 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and briefly attended the University of Tennessee where he began crafting short fiction and received the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing. Frequently compared to William Faulkner, McCarthy was known for his spare writing style and epic themes of apocalyptic danger, the nature of evil, and the fragility of the human condition. He set many of his novels amid the landscapes of the American Southwest and wrote all of them on an Olivetti Underwood Lettera 32 typewriter.
McCarthy published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, in 1965 at Random House where he would work with legendary editor Albert Erskine over the next twenty years. His second novel, Outer Dark was published in 1968, followed by Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridien (1985).
Long hailed a “writer’s writer” with a dedicated fan base of critics and readers, McCarthy became a best-selling author with the publication of his sequence of novels collectively referred to as The Border Trilogy, which includes All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). No Country for Old Men was published in 2005, and The Road, which was selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick (resulting in his only televised interview), in 2006. His final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022), are interconnected books questioning the notions of God, truth, and existence.
Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, said, “Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature. 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’s other works include The Gardener’s Son (screenplay, 1977), The Stonemason (play, revised 1994), Sunset Limited (novel in dramatic form, 2006) and The Counselor (screenplay, 2013). His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and No Country for Old Men, with the latter receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture.
McCarthy was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” in 1981 and began to attend MacArthur functions where he immersed himself in the worlds of science, mathematics, and psychology. He later became a member and trustee of the Santa Fe Institute. McCarthy was also the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship, the Texas Institute of Letters Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. His ninety-eight boxes (forty-six linear feet) of complete papers are housed in the Southwestern Writers Collection, The Wittliff Collections at Alkek Library, Texas State University – San Marcos.
Notoriously press-shy, McCarthy granted few interviews over the course of his career. 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.”
Cormac McCarthy
July 20, 1933 – June 13, 2023
James Wood wrote in appreciation: “To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape.”
Joy Williams reviewed McCarthy’s last novels thus, “McCarthy is not interested in the psychology of character. He probably never has been. He’s interested in the horror of every living creature’s situation. . . . McCarthy has long maintained a reverence for the unconscious, a belief that language can pay only inadequate homage to it. It’s that part of being that knows what cannot be known only through its own particular process.”
Robert Hass acknowledged Cormac McCarthy’s unique style: “Mr. McCarthy, because he is interested in the mythic shape of lives, has always been interested in the young and the old or, if not the old, then those who have already performed some act so deep in their natures (often horrific, though not always) that it forecloses the idea of possibility.”
Some of his notable works include:
