Cormac McCarthy, dark genius of American literature, dead at 89

Cormac McCarthy, whose nihilistic and violent tales of the American frontier and post-apocalyptic worlds led to awards, film adaptations and sleepless nights for his enthralled and appalled readers, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.

McCarthy – arguably the greatest American writer since Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner, both of whom he was sometimes compared to – died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to a statement from publisher Penguin Random House that cited his son, John McCarthy.

Little known for the first 60 years or so of his life, rapturous reviews of 1992’s All the Pretty Horses – the first in The Border Trilogy – changed all that. The book was made into a film – as were 2005’s No Country for Old Men and 2006’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road.

But McCarthy was never seen on the red carpet. An intensely private man, he almost never gave interviews. He granted a rare exception for Oprah Winfrey in 2007, telling her: “I don’t think [interviews] are good for your head. If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about it, you probably should be doing it.”

McCarthy wrote with a distinctive, spare style that eschewed grammatical norms but drew the reader in relentlessly to his world of blood, dust and an unforgiving universe.