literature
US author Cormac McCarthy dies at 89
Headstrong characters, cruel violence, dense prose: Cormac McCarthy’s books are dark – and bestsellers. Now he has died – just a month before his 90th birthday.
The US writer Cormac McCarthy, author of bestsellers such as “The Road” or “No Country for Old Men”, is dead. McCarthy was “one” on Tuesday at the age of 89 in his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico died of natural causes,” his agent told the German Press Agency in New York. The Knopf publishing house and John McCarthy, the author’s son, also confirmed the death of McCarthy, who was one of the most successful and important authors of his generation in the USA.
Author Stephen King expressed his sadness via short message service Twitter and described McCarthy as “perhaps the greatest American writer of my time”. McCarthy “changed the path of literature,” said Nihar Malaviya, interim director of Penguin Random House. “For 60 years he has shown an abiding passion for his art and for exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word.” Writer Lauren Groff wrote on Twitter that she was “oddly shocked” by McCarthy’s death. Although he created very few female figures in his work, he “turned this incompetence into a stroke of genius” – “his work is a poisonous condemnation of the hyper-masculine mythology of the West, at least that’s how I read it”.
The writer, who used a typewriter to the end, hadn’t published a new novel for around 16 years after his world bestseller “Die Straße” published in 2006 – and then two at once last year: “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris”, published in German translation by Rowohlt-Verlag at the end of 2022, are now the author’s farewell works. The two books, which are related in terms of content, are about a pair of siblings. “One is a total hit and the other isn’t bad either,” commented the New York Times.
Throughout his writing career, McCarthy gave so few interviews and so seldom appeared publicly that it even made headlines recently when some old local newspaper interviews of him from the ’60s and ’70s surfaced again. McCarthy says he prefers to just stay in bed. “Some days I get my books and my typewriter and just stay there all day – or several days.”
Nor can he explain how his novels come about. “It’s like jazz. They create it as they play, and maybe only those who do it can understand that.” He gets ideas that he then lets develop in his head before eventually getting the urge to write them down. “My hands then do the thinking. It’s not a conscious process.” Many of his works are hard to beat when it comes to horror and atrocities. “There is simply no life without bloodshed.”
McCarthy has published around a dozen novels, but for decades the author was only known to a few experts and fans. Hollywood then made him world famous. The western thriller “No Country for Old Men”, based on McCarthy’s novel of the same name, won four Oscars in 2008 – and the author even surprisingly appeared at the award ceremony himself.
His work All the Pretty Horses (1992) was also made into a film, starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. The book won the coveted National Book Award and became a bestseller. The novel “The Road”, published in 2006, won the Pulitzer Prize, was also made into a film – and was accepted by Oprah Winfrey into her famous book club. Surprisingly, McCarthy gave his consent – and America’s popular talk show hostess even gave one of his extremely rare interviews.
The writer was born in Rhode Island in 1933 and grew up as the son of a lawyer with five siblings in Tennessee. He tried to keep his private life out of the public eye as much as possible – or, as McCarthy once said in one of his early interviews: “I’m actually just very selfish and want to enjoy my life.”