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Journalism of Courage
Cormac McCarthy, the celebrated author of novels like No Country for Old Men and The Road, harrowing tales in the American South that explored violence, masculinity and fatherhood, has died at 89.
His son, John, confirmed the news on Tuesday, according to McCarthy’s publisher Knopf.
McCarthy was born in the southern state of Rhode Island in 1933 and was famously media-averse, giving his first television interview to Oprah in 2007 after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Road (2006), a post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son navigating an America laid to waste by a vaguely defined historical disaster. When asked whether he thought about his massive readership, he said, “In all honesty I have to say I really don’t. You would like for the people who appreciate the book to read it but as far as many, many people reading it, so what? It’s okay. Nothing wrong with it.”.
McCarthy was a minimalist writer whose sharp exploration of violence in the American landscape became a career-long obsession. In Blood Meridian (1985) he followed the story of “the kid”, an unnamed Tennessean teenager who encounters scalp hunters, a group of historical gangs who ripped the hair off native Americans in the US-Mexico border in the 1840s. The novel was hailed by famed literary critic Harold Bloom as “not only the ultimate western” but “the ultimate dark dramatisation of violence”.
McCarthy worked in relative obscurity till the age of 59, when the publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), a story about a Texan teenager who leaves for Mexico to become a cowboy after finding out that his childhood ranch is being sold, won him the National Book Award. It also kicked off the acclaimed Border trilogy.
No Country for Old Men (2005), about a trio caught in the middle of a drug deal gone bad, was adapted into an award-winning film of the same name by the Coen brothers in 2007, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin. It won four Oscars (including Best Picture), three BAFTAs and two Golden Globes. McCarthy himself wrote the occasional screenplay, including for crime thriller The Counselor (2013), about a lawyer who gets enmeshed into a drug deal. He was also working on an adaptation of Blood Meridian before his death.
Condolences from the literary community poured in Wednesday, including novelist Stephen King, who tweeted, “Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing”.
