Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy was one of six children in his large Irish Catholic family. Born in 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island, he spent most of his early life in Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer. McCarthy was an altar boy and attended a private Catholic school. He was, however, uninterested in formal education, preferring a plethora of hobbies. He discovered an interest in writing while attending college at the University of Tennessee, and a passion for reading during a short stint with the U.S. Air Force. After completing his military service, he returned to the University of Tennessee for a degree in English literature that he never completed. McCarthy’s early career was marked by personal and professional struggle. His first marriage, to Lee Holleman, ended when she left him shortly after the birth of their son Cullen. He was frequently broke, and it took him years to get his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, accepted for publication in 1965. However, grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and elsewhere kept him afloat and allowed him to travel Europe, where he met his second wife and wrote his second novel, Outer Dark, which was published in 1968. McCarthy was known as an eccentric, frequently turning down lucrative speaking gigs in order to focus on his writing even when his family was in abject poverty. He didn’t rise to critical acclaim until he was nearly 60, with the publication of the award-winning All the Pretty Horses in 1992. His 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road won a Pulitzer. McCarthy’s later success caused a reevaluation of his earlier work, particularly 1985’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, which is now widely considered his best work and acclaimed as one of the greatest American novels ever written. During his lengthy career, McCarthy penned 12 novels, two plays, five screenplays, and several short stories. His works center in the American West and Appalachia and frequently engage with themes of theodicy, nihilism, violence, dislocation, and loneliness. In his later years, McCarthy became heavily involved with the Santa Fe Institute, where he was one of the few non-scientists involved in the institute’s work. He died in 2023 just a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday.