Cormac McCarthy has died aged 89.
Cormac McCarthy has died aged 89
The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, perhaps best-known for writing ‘No Country for Old Men’ as it was turned into the multi-Oscar winning film of the same name by the Coen brothers, passed away on Tuesday (13.06.23) at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
His death was confirmed by his son John McCarthy in a statement from his publisher, Penguin Random House.
He produced a dozen novels across a career spanning nearly 60 years and in 2009 became the second author after Philip Roth to receive the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for lifetime achievement in American fiction.
Cormac told Rolling Stone about the main theme of his often violent novels: “If it doesn’t concern life and death, 'it’s not interesting.'
Born to a lawyer dad, Cormac’s family moved to Tennessee when he was four years old.
His given name was Charles, but he changed it to Cormac after an Irish king, and he chose not to finish university and instead focus on writing.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of his ‘No Country for Old Men’ novel starring Tommy Lee Jones won four Oscars, including one for Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who played the work’s sadistic serial killer.
In 2007, Cormac was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Road’, the story of a father and son making their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape, which was also turned into a film starring Viggo Mortensen.
Corman wrote his first novel ‘The Orchard Keeper’ while working at a car parts shop in Chicago in the 1960s.
The critically-acclaimed author received multiple writing fellowships, including one from the Rockefeller Foundation.
He was often compared to William Faulkner for his style and rural settings, as well as the bleak violence in his books.
Cormac was married and divorced three times and has two sons, Cullen McCarthy, and John Francis McCarthy.
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