Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023)

Author Cormac McCarthy, 89, died June 13, 2023 at home in Santa Fe NM. McCarthy was a celebrated and bestselling novelist, mostly of Westerns, but he also wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning postapocalyptic novel The Road (2006), adapted as a film in 2009.

Debut novel The Orchard Keeper appeared in 1965. Other novels are Outer Dark (1968), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award winner All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), No Country for Old Men (2005), and The Passenger (2022) and its companion novel Stella Maris (2022). He was also a playwright and screenwriter.

Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr. was born July 20, 1933 in Providence RI and grew up in Tennessee. He briefly attended the University of Tennessee in 1951 before dropping out to join the Air Force in 1953; he returned to college in 1957, and then began publishing stories. He dropped out again in 1959 and worked part-time while focusing on his writing, often struggling financially. He traveled extensively in Europe, funded by writing grants, and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, which allowed him to travel and research in the American Southwest. He later settled in New Mexico, where he became a trustee for the Santa Fe Institute, a scientific research center. He was married and divorced three times, and is survived by two sons.

For more, see his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.