Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Cormac McCarthy, who wrote novels such as The Road and Blood Meridian, died Tuesday at age 89.
McCarthy’s publisher explained that the writer died of natural causes in his Sante Fe home. “Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,” said Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya. “For 60 years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word.”
Known for his lyrical prose, McCarthy was the author of twelve novels, often apocalyptic Westerns. He also wrote several plays, short stories, and screenplays.
His style was restrained. McCarthy once described his writing as “simple declarative sentences.”
“I believe in periods and capitals and the occasional comma and that’s it,” McCarthy added.
Literary theorist Harold Bloom called McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian the greatest by a living American author and the ultimate Western. “It is as close to being the American prose epic as one can find,” Bloom said.
In Blood Meridian and other novels, McCarthy’s uncompromising approach to death and violence overwhelmed readers. However, “if you read your way into the cosmos of the book,” explained Bloom, “you get a great vision, a frightening vision of what is indeed something deeply embedded in the American spirit, in the American psyche.”
McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for The Road.
His novels were often adapted into films. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was adapted by the Coen Brothers and starred Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2007.
His last two books — The Passenger and Stella Maris — were released last year. National Review’s Jason Lee Steorts remarked that the two novels “present their wit and erudition as supports from which to consider the inherent burdens of the soul: to feel the shock of our existing and to weigh its mystery as we ought, with the courage of a fair scale but the expectation that it must fail under the burden.”
McCarthy is survived by his sons, Cullen and John, credited by McCarthy as the inspiration for The Road.