The American writer Cormac McCarthy has passed away this Tuesday at the age of 89. The American writer, one of the great voices of American literature and author of ‘The Road’ or ‘No Country for Old Men’, has died at his home in Santa Fe (New Mexico).
He won the Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Road’, his most popular work and which ended up being made into a movie. Recently, after sixteen years of editorial silence, the legendary narrator of ‘The Road’ reappeared last year with a double novel, ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’.
Knopf, the publisher with which he worked, has indicated in a statement that the writer’s son had confirmed his death, apparently from natural causes.
Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933, into a wealthy family of Catholic origin. But he spent his childhood in Knosxville, Tennessee, where he set his first four novels. Heir to the tradition of William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, he is one of the giants of American letters, at the top of his generation along with Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
The biography of this elusive narrator is an enigma. He gave just twelve interviews, the last one to Oprah Winfrey in 2007, when she won the Pulitzer for ‘The Road’, to clarify that writing is “a compulsion” for him.
Extreme violence and moral devastation mark novels such as ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2005), which takes place in the implacable southwest of the United States, and ‘The Highway’ (2006), the epic escape of a father and son in a apocalyptic world, the success of which was universal.
film adaptation
After novels such as ‘The guardian of the orchard’ (1965), ‘The outer darkness’ (1968), ‘Son of God’ (1973) and ‘Suttree’ (1979), McCarthy triumphed with ‘Meridian of blood’ (1985), and above all with the ‘Border Trilogy’ (1992-1998), made up of ‘All the Beautiful Horses’ (1992), ‘On the Border’ (1994) and ‘Cities on the Plain’ (1998). For his fiction he has won awards such as the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The first film adaptation of one of his works was ‘All the Beautiful Horses’ (2000), directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon and Henry Thomas. They followed ‘The Highway’ (2009), directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, and ‘No Country for Old Men’, directed by the Cohen Brothers, starring Javier Bardem, who plays the contract killer Anton Chigurh, and winner Four Oscars, including Best Picture. ‘Outer Darkness’ (2009) was adapted by Stephen Imwalle, and ‘Son of God’ (2013) by James Franco.
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