McCarthy was born in 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island. He moved to Knoxville with his family in 1937 after his father got a job as a lawyer with the Tennessee Valley Authority. When the young family bought a house at 5501 Martin Mill Pike in South Knox County in 1941, it was advertised as having 10 rooms, two baths and “automatic heat” on a three-acre lot.
He graduated from Catholic High School in 1951, attended but didn’t graduate from the University of Tennessee, and was wed to an English singer named Anne DeLisle in 1966 (his second marriage).
His first four novels — beginning with “The Orchard Keeper” in 1965 — were set in and around Knoxville and the Great Smoky Mountains. His characters included bootleggers, a serial killer and a host of petty criminals who spent their nights brawling, whoring and on one memorable occasion even molesting watermelons.
The couple lived in a barn just south of Knoxville for several years, but they divorced in the mid-1970s and McCarthy moved to New Mexico. The change in scenery soon impacted his work, and his 1985 book “Blood Meridian” (often touted as his masterpiece) was set in the blood-soaked deserts of the Southwestern United States in the early to mid-19th century. In 1992, he abruptly broke into the mainstream when “All the Pretty Horses,” a lyrical novel that featured brooding cowboys and a doomed romance, hit the bestseller lists and won the National Book Award.
But McCarthy’s most enduring creation may turn out to be “The Road,” the ultraviolent tale of a father-son team who make a desperate trek to the East Coast following a nuclear apocalypse. It’s one of the most haunting tomes in American literature, and it earned him the Pulitzer in 2007.
His final two novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” were published last year and sold over 100,000 copies in a mater of weeks, according to Publishers Weekly.
McCarthy, who won a MacArthur Fellowship (a so-called “genius grant”) in 1981, wrote all his novels on an Olivetti typewriter he bought in 1958 for only $50. The typewriter was auctioned off for more than $250,000 in 2009 and the proceeds donated to a nonprofit scientific research community in Santa Fe.
McCarthy’s childhood home burned to the ground the same year. The fire broke out only a year after local preservationists had dubbed it the most endangered historic structure in Knox County. The house was vacant at the time, and firefighters had to abandon efforts to quell the blaze due to concerns the dilapidated structure would collapse.
He was married for a third time in 1998 and divorced in 2005. He is survived by two sons and two grandchildren.
“Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature. For sixty years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word,” said Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, in a statement issued late Tuesday. “Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.”