His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965, but it was Blood Meridian in 1985 that garnered acclaim. Embarking on a writing career, he changed his name from Charles to Cormac so as not to be confused with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's famous dummy Charlie McCarthy. I mean, I think Fitzgerald had that ability, Faulkner had it as well - to describe menace and horror in such a way that you just cannot disengage, that's greatness."Īlthough McCarthy was born in Rhode Island, he grew up in the South, his father a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. It's some of the most extraordinarily beautiful writing I've ever seen, and it's horrifying. And it was a slaughter, and it's about two paragraphs. "There's one passage where he's describing the Indian raid on the cavalry group that had formed. "I have read that book I don't know how many times - a dozen times," Barbarese says. That night, the lad and two new acquaintances go to the local cantina, where they meet an old Mennonite who issues dire warnings that their adventure in Mexico will end badly. In exchange for a horse, saddle and boots, the boy agrees to join a renegade ex-Confederate captain who intends to invade Northern Mexico to claim it for white America. A teenage boy from Tennessee runs away and eventually lands in San Antonio, haggard and penniless. Take, for example, this early scene in McCarthy's Western classic Blood Meridian. And those two themes intersect again and again and again in McCarthy's writing." "The obsession not only with the origins of evil, but also history. Barbarese, a professor of English and writing at Rutgers University. "McCarthy was, if not our greatest novelist, certainly our greatest stylist," says J.T. ![]() There was a strong Southwestern sensibility to his work. He wrote most compellingly about men, often young men, with prose both stark and lyrical. ![]() McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his stunning, post-apocalyptic, father-son love story called The Road. His death was confirmed via a statement from his publisher. Mark Von Holden/Getty Images For Dimension FilmsĬormac McCarthy, one of the great novelists of American literature, died Tuesday of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. Cormac McCarthy attends the New York premiere of The Road, the film adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, in 2009.
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