![]() ![]() McCarthy wrote a play, The Stonemason, in 1994, then turned his 1984 screenplay No Country for Old Men into a novel in 2005 the Coen brothers adapted the bleak tale into an Oscar-winning film in 2007. The novel won the National Book Award and widespread fame for McCarthy, while the second, The Crossing, in 1994, and the concluding volume, Cities of the Plain, in 1998, were also acclaimed. His 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses was the first in the Border trilogy, which chronicled the lives of two cowboys working on the US-Mexico frontier. He credited Melville, Dostoevsky and Faulkner as formative, while professing his indifference to authors who didn’t “deal with issues of life and death”. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”įrom early, McCarthy’s style was instantly recognisable: sparse, often entirely omitting punctuation and using polysyndeton – inserting conjugations to slow the rhythm of his language – to create a sombre, melancholic tone. ![]() Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the paper. The New York Times said it “may be the bloodiest book since the Iliad” in a rare piece which included an interview with the novelist. Based on real events on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1950s, it follows the story of a 14-year-old Tennessean who finds himself in a world where Native Americans are being murdered. It was in 1985, with Blood Meridian, that McCarthy found critical acclaim. It was followed by novels including 1968′s Outer Dark, in which a woman has her brother’s child 1973′s Child of God, about a serial killer in the hill country of east Tennessee and the semi-autobiographical Suttree in 1979, which was often described as his funniest novel. ![]() His 1965 debut The Orchard Keeper, written while he worked as an auto mechanic and living in poverty, told telling of a young boy in rural Tennessee, and the outlaw who has killed his father. He grew up outside Knoxville, Tennessee, dropped out of the University of Tennessee, and joined the US air force for four years before going back to university, dropping out again, and beginning to write novels in 1959. McCarthy gave few interviews, with details about his life sparse for decades. Saul Bellow, who chose him as a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1981, praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”, while the literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian “not only the ultimate western” but “the ultimate dark dramatisation of violence”, placing him alongside three other contemporaries he said had touched the sublime: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. ‘The Road’ has featured on the Leaving Cert list of prescribed texts in the past.įor John Banville, McCarthy was an “extraordinary novelist, one of the very finest at work today, in America and in the wider world”, whose “work stands proud of the literary landscape, like one of those majestic, sharp-shadowed buttes in Monument Valley, though his colours can be as delicate as the palest shades of the Painted Desert”. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”īorn in Providence, Rhode Island in 1933 to an Irish Catholic family, Charles McCarthy adopted the pen name “Cormac” in reference to a family nickname. Stephen King wrote on Twitter: “Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. Other authors shared their thoughts on the death of their contemporary. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, in 2007, dominated that year’s Academy Awards and won best picture, while the 2009 film of The Road was also well received. Other critically acclaimed books by McCarthy are All the Pretty Horse and No Country for Old Men, both of which were turned into films. McCarthy was best known for The Road, the 2006 post-apocalyptic novel about a journey taken by a father and his son. His son John McCarthy confirmed the death. McCarthy died in his home of natural causes. Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89, the American author’s publisher has announced. ![]()
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