Authors react to Cormac McCarthy’s death

Hannah Murdock
·3 min read
Author Cormac McCarthy attends the premiere of “The Road” in New York on Nov. 16, 2009. McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who in prose both dense and brittle took readers from the southern Appalachians to the desert Southwest in such novels as “The Road,” “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses,” died Tuesday, June 13, 2023. He was 89.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Author Cormac McCarthy — best known for his violent, dark novels such as “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” — died at the age of 89 on Tuesday.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his son John McCarthy confirmed, according to a press release from Penguin Random House.

McCarthy’s macabre representations of America, from Appalachia to the Southwest, made him, as Publisher Weekly called him, a “behemoth of contemporary American letters.”

The post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, and his Western/crime thriller “No Country for Old Men” was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film.

It was his novel “Blood Meridian,” however, that made literary critic Harold Bloom call McCarthy “the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner.” According to Bloom, “Blood Meridian” is “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’”

“Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,” Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, stated. “For sixty years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word. Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.”

Many writers mourned the news of McCarthy’s death Monday, including “It” author Stephen King.

“Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89,” King wrote in a tweet. “He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”

Meanwhile, British author Robert MacFarlane, known for his works “Mountains of the Mind” and “The Wild Places,” called McCarthy a “giant of a writer,” and shared his favorite passage from “Blood Meridian.”

Annie Proulx, a novelist and short story writer perhaps best known for “Brokeback Mountain,” paid tribute to McCarthy in an article from The Guardian.

“More than sorrow I feel gratitude for the works of this extraordinary writer who, in presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence,” Proulx stated.