Cormac McCarthy, the novelist known for his Southern Gothic stories, died in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Tuesday at 89.
His publisher, Knopf, confirmed his death to Publishers Weekly.
McCarthy was one of the most celebrated novelists of his generation, considered by literary critic Harold Bloom to be as influential as Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth.
Born in 1933 in Rhode Island, McCarthy spent most of his young life in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father, Charles Joseph McCarthy, worked as a lawyer. He attended the University of Tennessee on and off before dropping out for good in 1959. He had a short-lived marriage to Lee Holleman, who divorced him after the couple had a child, Cullen.
In 1965, the author’s debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published. The book featured several tropes that would recur in much of the author’s work: father-son relationships; dark, Southern settings; and biblical allusions.
On a trip abroad, McCarthy met his second wife, Anne Delisle, and wrote his second book, Outer Dark. He and Delisle lived together in Tennessee before separating in 1976, when McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas. While there, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (aka a “Genius Grant”), and wrote several of his best-known novels, including Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award.
After McCarthy moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John, he was inspired to write The Road on a visit to El Paso in 2003. He later explained in an interview with Oprah that the novel was inspired by his relationship with his son. Winkley and McCarthy later divorced.
The Road would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and to be adapted into a film. McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was also adapted into a movie directed by the Coen brothers, whose work the author has explicitly praised.
After a 16-year break, McCarthy published two intertwined novels in late 2022: The Passenger (October) and Stella Maris (December).
McCarthy was deeply private and little else was known about his private life. At the end of his biography page on the Cormac McCarthy Society’s website, the fan club wrote, “Except for a few odds and ends (his favourite novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick; he doesn’t care for the work of Henry James, he doesn’t like to talk about writing, etc.), that’s more or less what we know about Cormac McCarthy”.
Indeed it is, aside from the impressive body of work he’s left behind.