Key Points
- Author Cormac McCarthy has died aged 89, his publisher has confirmed.
- The author died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to a statement.
- He was known for works including The Road, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men.
Pulitzer-prize winning author Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89.
McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to a statement from publisher Penguin Random House that cited his son John McCarthy.
Little known for the first 60 years or so of his life, rapturous reviews of 1992’s All the Pretty Horses – the first in The Border Trilogy – changed all that.
The book was made into a movie, as were 2005’s No Country for Old Men and 2006’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road.
But McCarthy was never seen on the red carpet.
An intensely private man, he almost never gave interviews.
He granted a rare exception for Oprah Winfrey in 2007, telling her: “I don’t think (interviews) are good for your head. If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about it, you probably should be doing it.”
Who was Cormac McCarthy?
Born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy was one of six children in his Irish Catholic family, and later switched to using the old Irish name of Cormac.
His father was a lawyer and he was brought up in Tennessee in relative comfort.
“I felt early on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen. I hated school from the day I set foot in it,” he told the New York Times in another rare interview in 1992.
He served in the Air Force in the 1950s and was married twice before the 1960s were out – first to Lee Holleman, who he met at college and with whom he had a son, and later to English singer Anne DeLisle, from whom he separated in 1976.
After a short spell in Europe, he returned to Tennessee to settle near Knoxville, Tennessee and later moved to El Paso, Texas and then to Santa Fe.
Cormac McCarthy has died aged 89. Source: AAP / The Pulitzer Prizes / Handout / EPA
His first book The Orchard Keeper, set in rural Tennessee and published in 1965, landed with Faulkner’s last editor, who recognised the young writer’s potential.
But despite positive reviews for his early works, commercial success eluded McCarthy and he scraped by on writers’ grants.
All the Pretty Horses, a coming-of-age book that kicked off a trilogy centred around Texas ranch hands at the close of the frontier, brought him acclaim in the 1990s.
The trilogy was followed by No Country for Old Men, a Western crime novel about a drug deal gone wrong, which was adapted into a movie by Joel and Ethan Coen that won the 2007 best picture Academy Award.
In 2006, post-apocalyptic novel The Road was published, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year and was later adapted into a film.
