Cormac McCarthy, celebrated US novelist, dies aged 89
Author of Blood Meridian, The Road and No Country for Old Men died in his home of natural causes, publisher announces
Cormac McCarthy, the revered novelist whose bleakly violent, apocalyptic visions of the American south drew him fans from Oprah Winfrey to Saul Bellow, has died at the age of 89.
McCarthy died in his home of natural causes. His son John confirmed the death.
Widely seen as one of the US’s greatest novelists, McCarthy was best known for The Road, the 2006 post-apocalyptic novel about a journey taken by a father and his son. Other critically acclaimed books by McCarthy are All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, both of which were turned into films. 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 authors shared their thoughts on the death of their contemporary. Stephen King wrote on Twitter: “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.”
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, McCarthy chronicled – in pared-back, dense, austere prose that prompted comparisons with authors including Herman Melville and William Faulkner – the violent lives of troubled characters. These ranged from No Country for Old Men’s Llewelyn Moss, who steals a case full of money from a scene of violent death near the Rio Grande and finds himself hunted, to the unnamed father and son in The Road, who walk a post-apocalyptic American hellscape peopled with cannibals and rapists.
For 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”.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/13/cormac-mccarthy-dead-novelist
.. It's damn gripping. Better than Harry Potter series in my opinion.
