Cormac McCarthy

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Tennessee, Cormac McCarthy was an award-winning American author of over ten novels, acclaimed screenplays, plays and short fiction, spanning the Western, Southern Gothic and post-apocalyptic genres.

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Biography

His debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, and was followed by Outer Dark (1968), which McCarthy wrote whilst living in Ibiza on a literary grant from awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Blood Meridian (1985), McCarthy’s fifth novel set in the hostile landscape of the Texas-Mexico border, has often been hailed as his masterpiece, whilst it was his sixth, All the Pretty Horses (1992) that became the most commercially and critically successful work of his career up to that point. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), which together form The Border Trilogy. In 2007, McCarthy was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his 2006 triumph, The Road – a story of a father and son on a journey through a ravaged, post-apocalyptic landscape. Many of McCarthy’s novels, including The Road and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men have been adapted into award-winning films. In 2022, he published what proved to be his two final works, the companion novels The Passenger and Stella Maris.

McCarthy passed away on 13 June 2023 at the age of 89 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.