Cormac McCarthy, Poet of Violence, Dead at 89
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The post Cormac McCarthy, Poet of Violence, Dead at 89 appeared first on Consequence.
Cormac McCarthy, who held up a mirror to America’s past with epic novels of regeneration through violence, has died at the age of 89.
The author of such tales as No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, The Road, and All the Pretty Horses, died Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to the New York Times.
Across 12 novels and two plays, McCarthy wielded the vocabulary of the American south inside Biblical themes of bloodlines and inherited guilt, his relentless sentences unfurling like an unbroken desert horizon. He exploded onto the literary scene with 1965’s The Orchard Keeper, which traced cycles of violence in the life of a Tennessee bootlegger and won the William Faulkner Foundation Award.
His reputation only grew with 1968’s Outer Dark, 1973’s Child of God, and 1979’s Suttree, but after the publication of 1985’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, neither his life nor American letters would ever be the same. A perennial nominee whenever the Great American Novel is brought up, this anti-Western followed the Kid, introduced at 14 years old as someone who “can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence.” He falls in with a murderous band along the border of the southern United States and commits an unfathomable number of murders, often of Native Americans, his guilt growing alongside a collection of bloody scalps.
McCarthy followed it with The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses (1992), his first bestseller; The Crossing (1994); and Cities of the Plain (1998). The first of these won the National Book Awardand the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 2000 was adapted into a film starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz.
In 2005 he released the novel No Country for Old Men, which was based on his own unproduced screenplay. Ethan and Joel Coen then adapted it into a 2007 film which was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem. In an interview about the film, Joel recalled, “Ethan once said, ‘It’s interesting, in adapting a novel like No Country, you need two people, because I hold the spine of the book open while he types it into a word processor.'”
McCarthy would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 bestseller, The Road, which updated his themes of survival and bloodlines to a post-apocalyptic future in an ash-covered America following an extinction event. The novel follows a father and son as they struggle to reach warmer climates before winter, foraging for food in ruined cities and fleeing from cannibal bands. In 2009, the book was turned into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Always reclusive, McCarthy seemingly retired from public life following the release of The Road. But in 2022 he unexpectedly released a pair of companion novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which together follow a pair of siblings whose father worked on the atomic bomb. While some critics lamented the lack of cohesive plot lines tying the events together, the novels were praised for incisive, beautiful sentences, and McCarthy was applauded for exploring new themes in his eighth decade.
Looking back, his works stand out as some of the most powerful examinations of violence ever printed. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 1992, one of the few interviews he granted. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”
Cormac McCarthy, Poet of Violence, Dead at 89
Wren Graves
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