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June 13, 2023 – Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, McCarthy chronicled – in pared-back, dense, austere prose that prompted comparisons with authors including Herman Melville and William Faulkner – the violent lives of troubled characters. These ranged from No Country for Old Men’s Llewelyn Moss, who steals a case full of money from a scene of violent death near the Rio Grande and finds himself hunted, to the unnamed father and son in The Road, who walk a post-apocalyptic American hellscape peopled with cannibals and rapists.
For John Banville, McCarthy was an “extraordinary novelist, one of the very finest at work today, in America and in the wider world”, whose “work stands proud of the literary landscape, like one of those majestic, sharp-shadowed buttes in Monument Valley, though his colours can be as delicate as the palest shades of the Painted Desert”.
Saul Bellow, who chose him as a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1981, praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”, while the literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian “not only the ultimate western” but “the ultimate dark dramatisation of violence”, placing him alongside three other contemporaries he said had touched the sublime: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.
