Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searing novel No Country for Old Men served as the foundation for the Coen brothers’ 2007 film that earned Oscars for best picture, supporting actor, directing and adapted screenplay, has died. He was 89.
McCarthy died Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his publisher, Knopf, confirmed.
Known for his crisp prose, foreboding view of humanity, uncompromising approach to death and violence — and rebellion against quote marks and semicolons — McCarthy was celebrated as one of the leading American authors of his time.
“He is the great pessimist of American literature, using his dervish sentences to illuminate a world in which almost everything (including punctuation) has already come to dust,” Tim Adams wrote in a 2009 profile for The Guardian. “He once argued that he could see no point at all in literature that did not dwell on death. His touchstones are Dostoevsky and Melville; he hasn’t much time for Henry James. His morbid visions, however, are so elemental in their telling that they have long won over those who have staked out more nuanced territory.”
McCarthy also was known for his sweeping “Border Trilogy” — comprised of 1992’s All the Pretty Horses, 1994’s The Crossing and 1998’s Cities of the Plain — and his post-apocalyptic tragedy The Road, published in 2006.
All the Pretty Horses was employed for a 2000 film that was directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starred Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz, and The Road became a 2009 release starring Viggo Mortensen. And his third novel, 1973’s Child of God, was used for a 2013 feature helmed by James Franco and starring Tim Blake Nelson.
The Counselor (2013), directed by Ridley Scott and starring Cruz, Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem and Cameron Diaz, represented McCarthy’s first original screenplay for the big screen. He also adapted his play The Sunset Limited for a 2011 HBO telefilm starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.
McCarthy received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 for The Road, a haunting book about the journey of a father and his son though a desolate world.
Usually reluctant to promote his work, the author agreed to sit with Oprah Winfrey for the first on-camera interview of his career after she put the spotlight on The Road during one of her monthly book club segments.
“Well, I don’t think [promotion is] good for your head,” McCarthy told Winfrey. “If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you shouldn’t be talking about it, you probably should be doing it. That’s my feeling.”
McCarthy went on to describe his distinctive writing style. “Simple, declarative sentences,” he said. “I believe in periods, capitals and the occasional comma. That’s it.”
On rare occasions, McCarthy would acquiesce to a colon. Semicolons were a waste, in his opinion, and he never felt the need to use quote marks when his characters spoke.
A McCarthy passage typically resembled this excerpt from 2005’s No Country for Old Men featuring one of his more infamous characters: the ruthless hitman Anton Chigurh, played by Bardem in the movie.
He ran cold water over his wrists until they stopped bleeding and he tore strips from a hand towel with his teeth and wrapped his wrists and went back into the office. He sat on the desk and fastened the toweling with tape from a dispenser, studying the dead man gaping up from the floor. When he was done he got the deputy’s wallet out of his pocket and took the money and put it in the pocket of his shirt and dropped the wallet to the floor. Then he picked up his air tank and the stun gun and walked out the door and got into the deputy’s car and started the engine and backed around and pulled out and headed up the road.
On the interstate he picked out a late model Ford sedan with a single driver and turned on the lights and hit the siren briefly. The car pulled onto the shoulder. Chigurh pulled in behind him and shut off the engine and slung the tank across his shoulder and stepped out. The man was watching him in the rearview mirror as he walked up.
What’s the problem, officer? he said.
Sir would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?
The man opened the door and stepped out. What’s this about? he said.
Would you step away from the vehicle please.
The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this bloodstained figure before him but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hand with his handkerchief. I just didn’t want you to get blood on the car, he said.
Bardem won the Oscar for best supporting actor for his chilling portrayal of Chigurh, and Joel and Ethan Coen shared the awards for directing, adapted screenplay and (with Scott Rudin) best picture.
The writing trophy was fitting as McCarthy had originally conceived No Country for Old Men as a screenplay, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2009. But there was little interest in his original version. “In fact, they said, ‘That will never work.’ Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn’t take long,” he said.
“I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for best screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, ‘Well, I didn’t do anything, but I’m keeping it.’”
He was born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Joseph, an attorney, secured a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority and moved the family to Knoxville. Dad’s middle name was Charles and he was nicknamed Cormac, its Gaelic equivalent, by his Irish aunts. His son adopted that for his pen name.
The oldest of six children, McCarthy was raised in relative prosperity in a house surrounded by lush wooded acres and staffed by servants. “We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks,” he told The New York Times in 1992.
Amid a proper Roman Catholic upbringing that included an education at St. Mary’s School and Knoxville Catholic High School, McCarthy was a bit of a rebel. “I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen,” he said. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it.”
McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee from 1951-52 before dropping out to join the Air Force. His four years of service included a tour of duty in Alaska, and to combat tedium, he read a great deal and fell in love with literature.
In 1957, McCarthy gave the University of Tennessee another shot and had two stories published in The Phoenix, the student literary magazine, but he dropped out before earning a degree. Moving to Chicago, he earned a living working in an auto parts warehouse.
He returned to Tennessee in 1961, then spent time in Wyoming; Asheville, North Carolina; and New Orleans as he finished up his first novel, The Orchard Keeper.
Knowing little about the book business, McCarthy sent a blind submission to Random House, the only publishing name he recognized. Albert Erskine, William Faulkner’s last editor, saw potential in McCarthy’s writing and took him on. (They would work together until Erskine’s retirement in 1987.)
Published in 1965, The Orchard Keeper had themes that are familiar to McCarthy’s fans. Set in a remote rural area of Tennessee, the story begins with a murder before going on to tell the relationship between the bootlegger who committed the crime and the dead man’s son, who doesn’t know his new friend killed his father.
Though honored with the William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel, The Orchard Keeper sold only a few thousand copies. McCarthy’s next four novels — 1968’s Outer Dark, Child of God, 1979’s Suttree and 1985’s Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West — also failed to catch on with the general public.
Wide success finally came in 1992 with the publication of his sixth novel, All the Pretty Horses. More upbeat and optimistic than his previous efforts, it followed the adventures of a young Texan who travels by horseback to Mexico with his friend. It has been described as Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on horseback.
(In the mid-1970s, the author had settled in El Paso, and many of his later novels were set in West Texas.)
“Cormac McCarthy must be acknowledged as a talent equal to William Faulkner,” the Times wrote in its Pretty Horses review. “But whatever he may owe to Faulkner’s style, his substance could not be more different. Faulkner’s work is all about human history and all takes place in mental spaces, while in Mr. McCarthy’s work human thought and activity seem almost completely inconsequential when projected upon the vast alien landscapes where they occur.
“Human behavior may achieve its own integrity — it’s John Grady’s conscientious striving for this quality that makes him Mr. McCarthy’s most appealing character — but it generally seems to have little effect. It’s unusual for a writer to adopt such a disinterested posture toward human beings, but Mr. McCarthy, like John Grady, seems to hold a higher opinion of horses.”
With All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy finally had a best-seller, and along with that came awards from the National Book Foundation and the National Book Critics Circle.
Survivors include his sons Cullen and John, whom he often credited as his inspiration for The Road.
“A lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had. I mean just that when I say that he’s the co-author of the book,” McCarthy said during his Wall Street Journal interview. “A lot of the things that the kid [in the book] says are things that John said.
“John said, ‘Papa, what would you do if I died?’ I said, ‘I’d want to die, too,’ and he said, ‘So you could be with me?’ I said, ‘Yes, so I could be with you.’ Just a conversation that two guys would have.”
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