“Here’s the boy. He is white and thin, wearing a thin linen shirt all torn apart. He lit the fire in the corner. Outside stretch the plowed fields, dark and covered with snow, and beyond even darker forests, where the few remaining wolves still live”. This is how Blood Meridian (1985) began, one of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, considered the greatest contemporary American novelist, who died yesterday at the age of 89.
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 American novelist of his time due to the subject matter of his works and his concise style.
McCarthy began writing at a very young age and published his first novels in the sixties, but recognition came to him in the early nineties with the Border Trilogy, which began with All Those Horses (1992), in which he narrates the ‘odyssey of two teenagers who flee their native village towards Mexico on their horses. The novel won two of the most prestigious literary awards in the United States, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
He continued with A la frontera (1994) and Ciudades de la llanura (1998), which made McCarthy an author of international prestige. His next work, No Country for Old Men (2005), continued along the same lines, the border between the United States and Mexico, but with an even more raw tone, as it immersed itself in the drug trade from the experience of its protagonist, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, in charge of investigating various drug trafficking crimes.
The novel was adapted into a film by the Coen brothers in 2007 starring Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin and won four Oscars, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Bardem. Hollywood also focused on 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 Road 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 son in a destroyed world after the end of civilization. The work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Despite being recognized also for his early works and 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, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published in 2022.
