McCarthy, whose nihilistic and violent accounts of the American frontier and post-apocalyptic worlds won him multiple awards, died Tuesday at age 89. The writer will also be remembered for the film adaptations of his stories and sleepless nights for his captivated and horrified readers.
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Cormac McCarthy was once called “the greatest American writer who didn’t become famous.”
For McCarthy, success came late, in part, thanks to Hollywood, which took advantage of its dark and cruel stories from the Old West. His editor announced that his death occurred from natural causes this Tuesday, June 13 at the age of 89.
Author of twelve novels, McCarthy was a demanding and upright writer. His stark depictions of human deviance quickly earned him a loyal, if small, circle of admirers.
Written in the early 1960s while working in a Chicago auto parts shop, ‘The Guardian of the Garden’, his first novel, was published by the prestigious Random House publishing house under the wing of Albert Erskine, editor of William Faulkner, whom McCarthy admired and was sometimes compared to.
This cruel and ironic story of characters unknowingly united by a corpse is also an ode to the wild nature of the mountains of Tennessee, the southern state where he spent his youth.
Although he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, McCarthy grew up on the site of former President Franklin Roosevelt’s “great works,” the Tennessee Valley dams, where his father was a lawyer.
‘The guardian of the orchard’, praised by critics, allowed McCarthy to live from his writing thanks to donations from institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1968 he published ‘The outer darkness’, a work that narrates the consequences of an incestuous relationship.
‘Blood Meridian’, a ‘western apocalyptic’
Also set in Appalachia, ‘Son of God’, published five years later, went even further in exploring the darkness of the soul with its murderous and necrophiliac protagonist, while the Tennessee River, a parable of life, became almost in the protagonist of the funny ‘Suttree’ that came out to the public in 1979.
It was around then that McCarthy moved to El Paso (Texas), on the border with Mexico. A land of violence and trafficking of all kinds, the region was to have a profound effect on his work.
McCarthy’s first “Wild West period” work, ‘Meridian of Blood’ (1985), chronicles the adventures of a young man in the turmoil of the 1840s, when Texas joined the United States. This ‘western apocalyptic’, with its rivers of blood, is considered by some critics to be his masterpiece.
In the 1990s he created the ‘Frontier Trilogy’, and again with the Old West as a backdrop he wrote: ‘All the Beautiful Horses’, ‘On the Frontier’ and ‘Plain Towns’.
McCarthy, about whom his first publisher claimed never to have “sold not a single one of his books” (none of his first five books sold more than 3,000 copies), saw, then, how his works amounted to more than 200,000 copies.
The four Oscars for the adaptation of ‘No Country for Old Men’
This late success was confirmed by Hollywood. First ‘All the Beautiful Horses’ was brought to the screen in 2000 with Matt Damon, and then ‘No Country for Old Men’, by the Coen brothers, which won four Oscars in 2008.
The previous year, McCarthy took home the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Highway’ (2006), the story of a wandering father and son in a country ravaged by a cataclysm of unknown origin.
Oprah Winfrey chose this book as one of the most important of the year and it was quickly adapted to the big screen.
16 years after ‘The road’, he returned with ‘The passenger’ (2022) and its prequel ‘Stella Maris’, published at the same time. In this story, set ten years before ‘The Passenger’, McCarthy takes a schizophrenic woman as the protagonist for the first time.
Introverted and detached from material obligations – he lived for a long time in seedy motels – McCarthy has only given a handful of interviews in his life.
In his only television interview, he explained to Winfrey that media exposure “isn’t 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. You have to,” he said.
with AFP
This article was adapted from its original in French.
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