Cormac McCarthy(1933–2023)

Charles Joseph Cormac McCarthy was born at Providence, Rhode Island, on the twentieth of July 1933, third of the six children of Charles Joseph McCarthy, a lawyer to the Tennessee Valley Authority of Irish-Catholic descent from the West Cork McCarthys, and Gladys Christina McGrail of Salem. The family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, on his father's TVA appointment in 1937, and he was raised in the Catholic working-class district of Knoxville and schooled at the Knoxville Catholic High School. He took the name Cormac in his twenties to distance the writing identity from his father. He attended the University of Tennessee 1951 to 1952 and 1957 to 1959 without taking a degree, served four years in the United States Air Force in Alaska 1953 to 1957, and committed full-time to the writing from 1959.

His first novel The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965 in his thirty-second year, edited by Albert Erskine (William Faulkner's editor), the editor who took McCarthy on the Random House list and stayed with him for the next twenty years. The early novels (The Orchard Keeper, 1965; Outer Dark, 1968; Child of God, 1973; Suttree, 1979) were the Appalachian Tennessee novels, set in the East Tennessee country of his upbringing, in the dense, Faulkner-and-Melville-saturated, biblically-cadenced prose register that became his signature. The novels sold modestly through the 1960s and 1970s on the strength of the small literary reputation Erskine carried for him and on the support of the Lyndhurst, Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.

The hinge of the work came with Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, published by Random House in April 1985 in his fifty-second year. The novel, the historical-Western retelling of the Glanton Gang scalp-hunting expeditions on the United States-Mexico border in the 1840s and 1850s, framed through the figure of the apocalyptic-philosophical Judge Holden, is on every modern list of the central American novels of the twentieth century (Time magazine 2005 100 Best English-language Novels; Harold Bloom's 1994 The Western Canon). The Border Trilogy followed: All the Pretty Horses (1992, National Book Award for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), the three connected New Mexico-and-Mexico narratives that took the Western register into a major late-twentieth-century literary form.

He moved from Tennessee to the south-west in the early 1990s and settled at the Santa Fe Institute (the cross-disciplinary scientific research institute on the southern outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico), where he held a Permanent Fellowship for the next thirty years, the only novelist on the Fellow roll alongside the leading physicists, complexity-theorists and biologists of the period. The late novels were No Country for Old Men (2005, the Coen Brothers' 2007 film adaptation winning four Academy Awards including Best Picture), The Road (2006, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007), and the diptych The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022). He died at his home in Santa Fe on the thirteenth of June 2023 in his eighty-ninth year. The McCarthy name in modern American letters carries the weight of Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy.