Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed writer whose books were regarded as American masterpieces, has died at 89.
Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed fiction writer whose books were regarded as American masterpieces by critics and legions of fans but who refused to offer insight into what had inspired them or what they might mean, has died.
His 2005 novel ”No Country for Old Men” was adapted into a screenplay for the Coen brothers’ movie of the same name, which won the Academy Award for best picture. And “The Road,” an allegorical tale of a father and son wandering through the gray gloom following an unexplained cataclysm, won the Pultizer Prize for fiction in 2007.
McCarthy refused to go on book tours, granted few interviews and turned down handsome honorariums on the lecture circuit. He was dismissive of many of his literary contemporaries and preferred the company of the scientists and deep-thinkers he met at the Santa Fe Institute, the New Mexico think tank where he frequently wrote.
Born Charles McCarthy Jr. in Providence, R.I., on July 20, 1933, he was the third of six children in an Irish Catholic family. The family moved frequently before settling in Knoxville, Tenn., where his father worked as an attorney for the powerful Tennessee Valley Authority. “We never had a lot when I was married to him,” DeLisle said years later. “But it always seemed we had as much as we needed.”Novels such as “All the Pretty Horses” and “Cities of the Plain” were filled with dust and mayhem. Gone were the twisted souls of the Deep South, replaced with stoic ranch hands, rustlers and gunslingers whose lives and fates played out in the harsh mid-day sun.
“A lot of people ask. I don’t have an opinion,” he told the Wall Street Journal when asked about the cataclysm that shades the book. “But it could be anything — volcanic activity, or it could be nuclear war. It’s not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do.”
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