American · 1933–2023
Cormac McCarthy wrote sentences that read like scripture, stripped of quotation marks and nearly all commas. He spent two decades in near-poverty around Knoxville, Tennessee, working on "Suttree" while living in barns and cheap motels. "Blood Meridian" (1985) turned the Western into philosophical horror: Judge Holden, hairless and enormous, lectures on geology and law while scalping his way across the 1849 borderlands. After moving to El Paso he wrote the Border Trilogy - "All the Pretty Horses," "The Crossing," and "Cities of the Plain" - in which teenage boys ride south into Mexico and come back changed, or not at all. "All the Pretty Horses" won the National Book Award in 1992; "The Road" won the Pulitzer in 2007. McCarthy gave almost no interviews and spent his later decades at the Santa Fe Institute among physicists rather than novelists. He published "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris" in 2022 and died the following June.