Cormac McCarthy, an author that has cemented himself as one of the best American authors, died on Tuesday of natural causes. He was 89 years old and his death was confirmed by his publisher through a statement.
Award Winning Author Cormac McCarthy Dies at 89
He won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his post-apocalyptic novel The Road. His writing style and storytelling have made his work unique and distinguishable from other authors. You can read the statement below by his publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
Statement by Cormac McCarthy’s Publisher
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 dramatized how the past overwhelmed the present. 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.
Alfred A. Knopf
For most of his life McCarthy was not known or celebrated. But that changed in 1992 with his novel All the Pretty Horses. After that, he became a household name over the next 15 years as his novels went on the win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer.
A Celebrated Author
An author has made it when they are an invited by Oprah on her show. McCarthy went on to write the novel “No Country for Old Men” which was adapted by the Coen brothers and went on the win an Oscar. Fans of the movie were shocked to learn that that many of the intense dialogue was pulled straight from the book.
“McCarthy was, if not our greatest novelist, certainly our greatest stylist,” says J.T. Barbarese, a professor of English and writing at Rutgers University. “The obsession not only with the origins of evil, but also history. And those two themes intersect again and again and again in McCarthy’s writing.”
With many amazing novels under his name, McCarthy was an author unlike any other. His novels often centered around young men and took place in the south. The authenticity and grittiness of the novel made them fan favorite and an author that carved his place as one of the best American literature authors to ever pick up the pen.
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