Cormac McCarthy, whose novels drew from the landscapes of Southern Appalachia and the Southwest, dies at 89

Cormac McCarthy (Photo by Dawn Jones, Professor Productions)

Cormac McCarthy, dubbed by The New York Times' Dwight Garner as “the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest,” died Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 89. The Times says McCarthy had a “powerful and intuitive sense of the American landscape” and notes that his first editor was William Faulkner’s last. The University of Kentucky's Guy Davenport (later a MacArthur fellow, as was McCarthy) wrote in 1968 that McCarthy's second novel, Outer Dark, was “compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax.”

McCarthy grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Knoxville, where his father, a Yale graduate, was a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority. “Often set in the backwoods of Tennessee or the great wide open of the Old West, McCarthy’s novels took violence to a nearly hallucinogenic level as he spooled out stories of murderous bounty hunters, drug deals gone fatally wrong and life in a post-apocalyptic netherworld,” writes Steve Marble of the Los Angeles Times. “During the course of his career, he won virtually every meaningful award, including a Pulitzer Prize.”

McCarthy's books included All the Pretty Horses (1992, his breakout novel and first set in the Southwest) and No Country for Old Men (2005), both adapted into movies; Child of God (1973); and Blood Meridian (1985), which "is regarded as McCarthy’s masterpiece," Marble writes. "Some critics hailed it as one of the great American novels."

Singer-songwirter Jason Isbell said McCarthy had "immeasurable" influence on him and other writers, but some didn't like his unusual style. “McCarthy had a strong aversion to punctuation, and often stripped his books of quotation marks, commas and hyphens,” Marble notes. “While some purists complained, many critics found his writing so seductive and self-propelled that readers would instinctively know what was a quote or when a sentence came to an end.”

UPDATE, June 14: The Washington Post has a guide to McCarthy and his books, including this: "Scholars Dianne C. Luce and Zachary Turpin made headlines when they unearthed at least 10 interviews McCarthy gave to local papers in Kentucky and Tennessee between 1968 and 1980. He told the Maryville-Alcoa Times in 1971: “My ideal would be to be completely independent. If I could, I’d have a small mill to generate our electricity. But you have to compromise.” In looking for more old clips, we found a review of The Ochard Keeper by Tennessee Appalachian author Wilma Dykeman in the Knoxville News Sentinel, which concluded: "He may become a coterie writer, refining his keen and original sensibilities into ever mor elegant and abstruse prose; or he may become a richly endowed observe of the human scene, with much to tell us about ourselves."