2023-06-15 14:01:46
Cormac McCarthy was best known for his Borderlands trilogy as well as his novel “ The road ».
Cormac McCarthy, the famous novelist known for his apocalyptic visions of the American West, died on Tuesday June 13. He was 89 years old.
McCarthy’s publisher, Penguin Random House, confirmed his death in a statement, according to the Washington Post. The cause of death was not specified.
McCarthy’s work was often dark and stark, his writing style direct and unrelenting, with little use of punctuation. He has published 12 novels over his nearly six-decade career, and is best known for blood meridian et the trilogy of the borders (published during the 1990s), as well as for his novel The roadwinner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. The Coen brothers adapted McCarthy’s 2005 novel, No Country for Old Menin a 2007 film, which won the Oscar for Best Picture.
If McCarthy kept a low profile for the next 16 years The roadhe came back strong last year, publishing what would be his last two novels, The passenger et Stella Maris.
McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, the third in a family of six children. When he was four, the family moved south to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as an attorney for the Tennessee Valley Authority. McCarthy then spent two years at the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and engineering.
As he said to Rolling Stone in 2007 he was ” good at science “, more ” not so good “. He pursues : ” I didn’t want to do anything if I wasn’t the best. It’s my own extravagant ego ».
He turned to writing after a teacher asked him to re-punctuate an 18th century collection of essays for inclusion in a textbook. After dropping out of college, he joined the Air Force and found himself stationed in Alaska for two years, where he became an avid reader.
After his departure from the Air Force, he returned to UT and began writing, publishing two short stories in the student literary magazine. But in 1959, he again abandoned his studies before graduating and moved to Chicago, where he worked in a spare parts warehouse while writing his novel. It took McCarthy several years to complete and publish his book, The Guardian of the Orchardwhich appeared in 1965. During this period, McCarthy also married, had a child and divorced.
Good that The Guardian of the Orchard was not a success, it won the William Faulkner Foundation Prize and provided McCarthy with grants and scholarships that enabled him to travel and continue writing (this was during a trip to Europe in 1965 where he met his second wife, Anne DeLisle).
In his next two books, The Darkness Outside (1968) et A child of God (1973), he honed his talent for telling macabre and violent stories. Suttreepublished in 1979, is equally dark.
McCarthy’s early novels are largely set in southern Appalachia, where he grew up, but he soon heads west. He moved to El Paso, Texas in 1976 after splitting from DeLisle, and in 1981 he was awarded the illustrious (and lucrative) MacArthur Fellowship, which allowed him to spend several years doing research and write his next book, blood meridianpublished in 1985.
Of his interest in the American West, McCarthy said, ” It’s a story that everyone knows. You can go to Mongolia and they know the cowboys and the Indians – but no one took it seriously and considered it a subject of literary endeavour. »
blood meridian took it not only seriously, but also appallingly. Set in the mid-19th century, the book chronicles the vicious exploits of the Glanton gang, a veritable group of “scalp hunters” who massacred dozens of natives in the border areas between the United States and Mexico. Although the book was initially not very successful, it was later considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
About his predilection for writing such violence, McCarthy told the New York Times in 1992 : ” There is no life without bloodshed. I think the idea that the species can somehow be improved, that everyone can live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted by it are the first to give up their soul, their freedom. Your desire for it to be so will enslave you and make your life empty. »
And if his books are set a century before, McCarthy hinted at Rolling Stone that the violence of his novels reflected both the present (and the future) of America: If I wrote about violence in an exaggerated way, it was because I envisaged a future that I imagined would be much more violent. And that’s the case. Do you remember two years ago having beheadings on television? Not me. »
McCarthy’s next novel, Such pretty horses appeared seven years later, in 1992. After decades of relatively steady critical acclaim, but little commercial success (none of his books had sold more than 5,000 copies), McCarthy finally had a bestseller to hit. Such pretty horses kicked off McCarthy’s Borderlands trilogy, which he continued in 1994 with The Great Passage and which he closed in 1998 with towns in the plain.
If the Borderlands Trilogy ultimately brought McCarthy mainstream success, his next two booksNo Country for Old Men (2005) et The road (2006), made him a literary legend. The road, in particular, is a major achievement, with McCarthy moving past the violent hell of contemporary/historic America and envisioning life after the apocalypse. The book follows a father and son as they navigate a desolate United States after a natural disaster; McCarthy dedicated the book to her own young son, John.
« When you’re young and single, you hang out in bars and you don’t think about what’s going to happenMcCarthy told Rolling Stone. But in the next 50 years, when you have kids, you’ll start thinking about their lives and the world they’ll have to live in. And that’s a sobering thought these days. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but the world is in a very unstable situation. »
Although McCarthy did not publish any further novels until 2022, he remained busy with writing and other projects. He maintains close ties to the Santa Fe Institute, a non-profit theoretical research institute, indulging his love of science, which seems to have greatly inspired his last two novels. After seeing several of his own books made into movies, McCarthy finally saw one of his own scripts produced: Cartel in 2013, directed by Ridley Scott.
In 2007, at the heart of the apocalyptic aura of The road, McCarthy spoke with sobriety and serenity about aging and what he had come to value most in life. ” For a man, there are two very important things in life, which far outweigh everything else. Finding a job you love and finding someone to live with that you love. Very few people get both. »
Jon Blistein
Translated by the editor
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