McCarthy, Cormac (1933-2023), was an American novelist known for his intense, often violent stories about individuals in conflict with nature and society. A number of McCarthy’s novels have been made into motion pictures. McCarthy won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Road (2006), a story about a man and his son struggling to survive in a bleak world devastated by an unnamed disaster, possibly a nuclear war.
Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. His family nicknamed him Cormac, the Irish equivalent of Charles. He moved to Tennessee at the age of 4 with his family. McCarthy’s first four novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree (1979)—were set in Tennessee. The stories involve such dark themes as murder, poverty, and insanity, leading some critics to compare McCarthy to the Southern writers William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.
McCarthy moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1976 and shifted the location of his fiction to the Southwest and Mexico. He won praise for his “Border Trilogy,” consisting of All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). The trilogy is noted for its lyrical portrayal of the harsh Southwestern landscape and for its brutal action. McCarthy’s other novels include Blood Meridian (1985) and No Country for Old Men (2005), both also set in the Southwest. McCarthy’s first original screenplay, The Counselor (2012), was made into a motion picture in 2013. The Passenger and Stella Maris are interconnected novels published in 2022. McCarthy died on June 13, 2023.
