The great American writer Cormac McCarthy, who found success late in life thanks to his emblematic novels such as “Such pretty horses” or “The road”, died Tuesday at the age of 89 from natural causes, announced his editor.
Chronicler of Appalachian America and the dark and cruel “Wild West”, McCarthy, whose novels were adapted by Hollywood (“No Country for old men”) and who won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize, died at his home in Santa Fe, in the state of New Mexico, according to a statement from publishing giant Penguin Ramdom House. “His death has been confirmed by his son, John McCarthy,” it said.
Cormac McCarthy, once described as “the best American writer not to be famous”, wrote twelve novels which earned him a circle of loyal admirers. Born in 1933 in Providence, he grew up in Tennessee, where his father was a lawyer. The critical success of his first book Le guardian du verger allows Cormac McCarthy to live from his pen thanks to donations from institutions, such as the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1968, he published The Darkness Outside, a work that narrates the consequences of an incestuous relationship. His second novel Un enfant de Dieu appeared five years later. The work goes even further in exploring the darkness of the soul with its murderous and necrophiliac main character. In 1979, he released his third novel: Suttree. It was at this time that Cormac McCarthy left to live in El Paso (Texas, south), on the Mexican border. A region that will deeply mark his work.
Blood Meridian (1985), the first opus of Cormac McCarthy’s “Wild West period”, recounts the adventures of a young boy in the turmoil of the 1840s, when Texas joins the United States. This “apocalyptic western”, where rivers of blood flow, is considered by some critics to be his masterpiece.
The 1990s were those of La trilogie des confins, always against a background of the Far West: Such pretty horses, The great passage and Cities in the plain. Cormac McCarthy, about whom his first publisher said “we never sold a single one of his books” (none of his first five books exceeded 3,000 copies), finally sees his circulation climb to more than 200,000 copies. This late success is reinforced by Hollywood. It will first be So pretty horses, brought to the screen in 2000 with Matt Damon, then No, this country is not for the old man (No Country for old men), by the Coen brothers, who won four Oscars in 2008.
The previous year, Cormac McCarthy obtained his marshal’s baton with the prestigious Pulitzer Prize awarded to The Road (2006), the story of a wandering of a father and a son in a country ravaged by a cataclysm of unknown origin. . American small-screen popess Oprah Winfrey selected this book as one of the most important of the year and the work was quickly adapted to the big screen. Sixteen years after The Road, he is back with Le Passager (2022) and its prequel Stella Maris published in stride. In this story which takes place ten years before The Passenger, McCarthy takes for the first time a woman, schizophrenic, as the main character.
First to react, the literary giant Stephen King bowed on Twitter to “perhaps the greatest American novelist of (his) time”. Rock musician Jason Isbell also wondered on Twitter “how many of us have been influenced by McCarthy? Countless.” “Millions of readers around the world have embraced his characters, his mythical themes, and the intimate, genuine emotions he has laid down on every page in brilliant novels that will remain both current and timeless for generations to come,” wrote his editor to pay tribute to him.
Reclusive and detached from material constraints – he lived for a long time in seedy motels – Cormac McCarthy granted only a handful of interviews in his life. In his only television interview, he explained to Oprah Winfrey that exposing himself in the media “was not very good for the mind. If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t talk about it. It has to be done”.
