Cormac McCarthy, author of Blood Meridian, dead at 89

Cormac McCarthy, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in American history, has died aged 89. 

McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Sante Fe, New Mexico, on Tuesday, his son John McCarthy confirmed.

The Pulitzer Prize-winner was known for such Western and apocalyptic novels as ‘The Road,’ ‘Blood Meridian’ and ‘No Country for Old Men,’ which was adapted by the Coen brothers into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name. 

His other honors include a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for ‘All the Pretty Horses.’

Cormac McCarthy attends the HBO Films & The Cinema Society screening of Sunset Limited at Porter House on February 1, 2011 in New York City

Fellow author Stephen King led tributes online, writing 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.’

Robert McFarlane also paid tribute, writing on Twitter that McCarthy was: ‘A giant of a writer, who wrote with a pen of iron, torqued language into new forms & worked the rhythms of prose into wire-flashes of lightning & great rolls of thunder.’ 

In 2009, he became the second author, after Philip Roth, to receive the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for lifetime achievement in American fiction.

 He explored themes of despair as well as tenderness, while not shying away from brutal violence. 

‘If it doesn’t concern life and death,’ Mr. McCarthy once told Rolling Stone, ‘it’s not interesting.’ 

His novels took readers across the great range landscapes of the United States from the deserts of the Southwest to the woods of Tennessee, even the bleakness of a post apocalypse world.

McCarthy was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and was compared to William Faulkner for his Old Testament style and rural settings. 

McCarthy’s themes, like Faulkner’s, often were bleak and violent and dramatized how the past overwhelmed the present. 

McCarthy seen at the premiere of ‘The Road’ at Clearview Chelsea Cinemas in New York City in 2009

Cormac McCarthy sitting between Nicky Tirrell (left) and his second wife Anne DeLisle, who were singing partners under the stage of name of the Healey Sisters, taken while the couple was on a trip to Bermuda in 1972

‘The Road,’ his stark tale of a father and son who roam a ravaged landscape, brought him his widest audience and highest acclaim

McCarthy seen at a 2011 screening of ‘Sunset Limited’ with actor Samuel L Jackson, HBO Films president Len Amato, and director and actor Tommy Lee Jones

Across stark and forbidding landscapes and rundown border communities, he placed drifters, thieves, prostitutes and old, broken men, all unable to escape fates determined for them well before they were born. 

As the doomed John Grady Cole of McCarthy’s celebrated ‘Border’ trilogy would learn, dreams of a better life were only dreams, and falling in love an act of folly.

McCarthy’s own story was one of belated, and continuing, achievement and popularity. 

Little known to the public at age 60, he would become one of the country’s most honored and successful writers despite rarely talking to the press. 

He broke through commercially in 1992 with ‘All the Pretty Horses’ and over the next 15 years won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, was a guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show and saw his novel ‘No Country for Old Men’ adapted by the Coen brothers into an Oscar-winning movie. 

Fans of the Coens would discover that the film’s terse, absurdist dialogue, so characteristic of the brothers’ work, was lifted straight from the novel.

‘The Road,’ his stark tale of a father and son who roam a ravaged landscape, brought him his widest audience and highest acclaim. 

It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was selected by Winfrey for her book club. 

McCarthy was known for such Western and apocalyptic novels as ‘The Road,’ ‘Blood Meridian’ and ‘No Country for Old Men,’

McCarthy pictured in c.1967 while living in Louisville, Kentucky 

McCarthy pictured as a student at the University of Tennessee, which he dropped out of twice

In his Winfrey interview, McCarthy said that while typically he didn’t know what generates the ideas for his books, he could trace ‘The Road’ to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, early in the decade. 

Standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night as his son slept nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.

‘I just had this image of these fires up on the hill … and I thought a lot about my little boy,’ he said.

He told Winfrey he didn’t care how many people read ‘The Road.’

‘You would like for the people that would appreciate the book to read it. But, as far as many, many people reading it, so what?’ he said.

McCarthy dedicated the book to his son, John Francis, and said having a child as an older man ‘forces the world on you, and I think it’s a good thing.’ 

The Pulitzer committee called his book ‘the profoundly moving story of a journey.’

‘It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, ‘each the other’s world entire,’ are sustained by love,’ the citation read in part. 

‘Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.’

In 2022, Knopf made the startling announcement that it would release McCarthy’s first work in more than 15 years, a pair of connected novels he had referred to in the past: ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris,’ narratives on a pair of mutually obsessed siblings and the legacy of their father, a physicist who had worked on atomic technology. 

‘Stella Maris’ was notable, in part, because it centered on a female character, an acknowledged weakness of McCarthy’s.

‘I don’t pretend to understand women,’ he told Winfrey.

His first novel, ‘The Orchard Keeper’ — written in Chicago while he was working as an auto mechanic — was published by Random House in 1965. His editor was Albert Erskine, Faulkner’s longtime editor.

Other novels include ‘Outer Dark,’ published in 1968; ‘Child of God’ in 1973; and ‘Suttree’ in 1979. 

The violent ‘Blood Meridian,’ about a group of bounty hunters along the Texas-Mexico border murdering Indians for their scalps, was published in 1985. 

His ‘Border Trilogy’ books were set in the Southwest along the border with Mexico: ‘All the Pretty Horses’ (1992) — a National Book Award winner that was turned into a feature film; ‘The Crossing’ (1994), and ‘Cities of the Plain’ (1998).

McCarthy said he was always lucky. He recalled living in a shack in Tennessee and running out of toothpaste, then going out and finding a toothpaste sample in the mailbox. 

‘That’s the way my life has been. Just when things were really, really bleak, something would happen,’ said McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship — one of the so-called ‘genius grants’ — in 1981.

McCarthy was married first to poet Lee Holleman McCarthy with whom he had a son, Cullen. 

According to her obituary she filed for divorce after he asked her to get a job as well as tend to the house and a baby, so that he could focus solely on his writing. 

He met his second wife, singer Anne De Lisle while travelling Europe on an American Academy of Arts and Letters fellowship, and they later moved into a converted dairy farm near Knoxville.

‘We lived in total poverty,’ De Lisle once told the Times. ‘We were bathing in the lake. Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.’ 

The couple separated in 1976, when McCarthy moved to El Paso.  

In 2009, Christie’s auction house sold the Olivetti typewriter he used while writing such novels as ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’ for $254,500. McCarthy, who bought the Olivetti for $50 in 1958 and used it until 2009, donated it so the proceeds could be used to benefit the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research community. 

He once said he didn’t know any writers and preferred to hang out with scientists. 

The Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos purchased his archives in 2008, including correspondence, notes, drafts, proofs of 11 novels, a draft of an unfinished novel and materials related to a play and four screenplays.

McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee for a year before joining the Air Force in 1953. He returned to the school from 1957 to 1959, but left before graduating. As an adult, he lived around the Great Smoky Mountains before moving West in the late 1970s, eventually settling in Santa Fe.

His Knoxville boyhood home, long abandoned and overgrown, was destroyed by fire in 2009.