Facts about Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy died at 89 years old
Born: July 20, 1933
Died: June 13, 2023
Best known as: Author of All the Pretty Horses

     
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Cormac McCarthy Biography

Name at birth: Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr.

Cormac McCarthy was an American novelist whose best known works made it to the big screen in the form of All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road.

Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), won a Faulkner Award, and subsequent grants and fellowships allowed him to continue writing novels while he lived in Tennessee and Texas.

Although his novels Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973) and Suttree (1979) solidified his literary reputation, he was relatively unknown until 1985’s Blood Meridian, a violent epic about the American west.

During the ’90s McCarthy, hailed as a prose stylist in the tradition of Hemingway and Faulkner, became famous for his literary westerns called The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses (1992, winner of the National Book Award), The Crossing(1994) and Cities on the Plain (1998).

His other novels included No Country for Old Men (2005, based on his own screenplay), The Road (2006) and The Passenger and Stella Maris (both 2022).

 

Extra credit

Billy Bob Thornton directed Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz in the movie All The Pretty Horses (2000)… The Coen brothers made a movie of No Country for Old Men (2007, starring Tommy Lee Jones)… Viggo Mortensen starred in the film version of The Road (2009)
… There is another Cormac McCarthy, a folk singer and songwriter from New England. The two are not related.


     

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