Cormac McCarthy: ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men' author dies aged 89

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist responsible for “The Road,” “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses” has died aged 89.

McCarthy died of natural causes in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on Tuesday, publisher Alfred A. Knopf said.

McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, 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 dramatised how the past overwhelmed the present.

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 US’s most honoured 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. 

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 (£200,000). McCarthy, who bought the Olivetti for $50 (£40) 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.

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