(New York) Cormac McCarthy, once described as “the best American writer not to be famous”, found success later in life, in part thanks to Hollywood taking over his dark and cruel stories of “Far West”.
He died Tuesday of natural causes at the age of 89, his publisher announced.
Author of twelve novels, Mr. McCarthy is a demanding and honest writer. His crude portrayals of human deviance quickly earned him a loyal but small circle of admirers.
Written in the early 1960s while working at an auto parts store in Chicago, The guardian of the orchardhis first novel, was published by the prestigious Random House, under the wing of Albert Erskine, editor of William Faulkner, whom Cormac McCarthy admired and to whom he was sometimes compared.
This cruel and ironic story of characters linked without their knowledge by a corpse is also an ode to the wild nature of the mountains of Tennessee, the southern state where he spent his youth.
Although he was born in 1933 in Providence, the young Cormac, Charles by his original first name, grew up on the site of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “great works”, the dams in the Tennessee valley, where his father was a lawyer.
critical success, The guardian of the orchard allows Cormac McCarthy to live from his pen thanks to donations from institutions, such as the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1968 he published The darkness outsidea work that narrates the consequences of an incestuous relationship.
Also located in Appalachia, A child of Godfive years later, goes even further in exploring the darkness of the soul with its murderous and necrophiliac main character, while the Tennessee River, a parable of life, becomes almost the main character of the drôlatique Suttree in 1979.
It was at this time that Cormac McCarthy left to live in El Paso, on the Mexican border. Land of violence and trafficking of all kinds, the region will deeply mark his work.
Oscar, Pulitzer
blood meridian (1985), the first opus of Cormac McCarthy’s “Wild West period”, recounts the adventures of a young boy in the turmoil of the 1840s, when Texas joined the United States. This “apocalyptic western”, where rivers of blood flow, is considered by some critics to be his masterpiece.
The 1990s are those of The borderlands trilogystill with a Wild West background: Such pretty horses, The big passage And towns in the plain.
Cormac McCarthy, about whom his first publisher said “we never sold a single one of his books” (none of his first five works exceeded 3,000 copies), finally saw his circulation climb to over 200,000 copies.
This late success is reinforced by Hollywood. It will be first Such pretty horsesbrought to the screen in 2000 with Matt Damon, then No, this country is not for the old man (No Country for old men), by the Coen brothers, who won four Oscars in 2008.
The previous year, Cormac McCarthy earned his marshal’s baton with the prestigious Pulitzer Prize awarded to The road (2006), story of a wandering of a father and a son in a country ravaged by a cataclysm of unknown origin.
The American “high priest” of the small screen Oprah Winfrey selects this book among the most important of the year and the work is quickly adapted to the big screen.
Sixteen years later The roadhe returns with The passenger (2022) and its preview Stella Maris published immediately. In this story that takes place ten years before The passengerMcCarthy takes for the first time a woman, schizophrenic, for main character.
Reclusive and detached from material constraints – he lived for a long time in seedy motels – Cormac McCarthy granted only a handful of interviews in his life.
In his only television interview, he explained to Mr.me Winfrey that exposing herself to the media “wasn’t very good for the spirit. If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t talk about it. It has to be done “.