Stephen King and Others Remember Cormac McCarthy In These Touching Tributes
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Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist widely considered one of the greatest American writers of his generation, died on Tuesday at age 89, prompting an outpouring of tributes from writers and artists whose lives were profoundly affected by his work.
McCarthy, who died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, wrote 12 acclaimed novels, as well as plays, screenplays, and short stories. Known for his stark prose and often merciless portrayals of violence, some of his best known works included Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), and The Road (2006).
“Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,” said Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, McCarthy’s publisher. “For 60 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.”
The influential literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy one of the four best American novelists, along with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pyncheon, and Philip Roth, all of whom he said “touched what I would call the sublime.” Bloom particularly praised McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which he called “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.”
Several of McCarthy’s books have been adapted into films, most notably his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men. Directed and adapted by the Coen Brothers, it won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem’s portrayal of Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic killer and personification of unstoppable and unknowable evil, a common archetype in McCarthy’s works.
All the Pretty Horses was adapted into a 2000 film directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon. The Road, McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning novel, was made into a 2009 film starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world. The Sunset Limited (2011) and Child of God (2013) were also adapted into films.
McCarthy’s work impacted and inspired artists of all mediums, several of whom shared thoughts and eulogies for the author following his death. Below are a few examples:
Best-selling novelist 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.”
British writer Robert MacFarlane
“Cormac McCarthy has died today,” MacFarlane tweeted. “A giant of a writer, who wrote with a pen of iron, torqued language into new forms & worked the rhythms of prose into wire-flashes of lightning & great rolls of thunder.”
MacFarlane then shared a favorite passage from Blood Meridian:
“In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone not blade of glass could put forth claim to precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinship.”
Novelist and poet Jason Fasano
In a touching tweet, Fasano wrote: “When a great artist dies, there is the moment when the world understands it will never again have a new creation from that mind, that heart, that vast soul. It is a loss beyond measure, but what that soul has left us is a gift beyond time. Rest in everything, Cormac McCarthy.”
Singer-songwriter Jason Isbell
“How many of us did he influence? Immeasurable,” Isbell first tweeted. He then added, “I could go onstage and say ‘this next one was influenced by Cormac McCarthy’ and literally sing any song I’ve ever written.”
Irish novelist John Banville
Banville called McCarthy a “giant figure” and his death a “great loss,” in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today program. The novelist also said: “He was unique. He stood out – he jutted out from the literary landscape like a monolith... Sometimes, reading Cormac’s prose, especially in Blood Meridian, you say to yourself, ‘This is just so far over the top that it’s unreal.’ And yet it was extraordinarily compelling. I mean, nobody wrote the way he did.”
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