The American writer Cormac McCarthy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Road (2006) and author of works such as No Country for Old Men, has died this Tuesday at the age of 89 at his home in Santa Fe (New Mexico), according to reports announced his agent.
He belonged to a generation of great writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo or Philip Roth, but critics always considered McCarthy as the great contemporary American novelist due to the subject matter of his works and his concise style.
McCarthy began writing very young and published his first novels in the 1960s, but recognition came to him in the early 1990s with the so-called Border Trilogy, which began with All the Beautiful Horses (1992), where he narrates the Odyssey of two teenagers who flee their hometown to Mexico on the back of their horses. The novel won two of America’s most prestigious literary awards, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
He continued with On the Border (1994) and Cities on the Plain (1998), which made McCarthy an author of international prestige. His next work, No Es País para Viejos (2005), followed the same paths, the border between the United States and Mexico, but with an even cruder tone, as it immersed itself in drug trafficking based on the experience of its protagonist. , Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, in charge of the investigation of various drug crimes.
The novel was made into a film by the Coen brothers in 2007 with Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin as protagonists and it won four Oscars, best picture, best direction, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for Bardem. Hollywood also took notice of McCarthy’s next novel, The Road (2006), which was adapted in 2009 by John Hillcoat into a film with the same title starring Viggo Mortensen.
The Highway is McCarthy’s most famous novel and also the one that underpinned his prestige. It is a post-apocalyptic story that places a father and a son in a ruined world after the end of civilization. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Despite also being recognized for other novels that had their cinematographic counterpart -such as All the Beautiful Horses, which made it to the cinema as All the Beautiful Horses- and for his performance as a screenwriter, McCarthy was always reluctant to appear in the media. A rule that he broke in 2007 to be interviewed on The Oprah Winfrey Show, hosted by the popular journalist
His last two works, El Pasajero and Stella Maris, were published in 2022.
