Born July 20, 1933, and dead June 13, 2023
Writer of southern gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic fiction. All of it bleak, many of them moderately violent. He rarely used literary agents and never owned a computer. His favorite novel was Moby Dick, and he thought little of any writer whose stories did not predominantly deal with issues of life and death. He had few associations with other writers or literary scenes, stating that he preferred the company of scientists. He spent most of his life as a teetotaler, citing alcohol as “an occupational hazard to writing,”. McCarthy is broadly considered one of the “great American novelists”, a borderline endangered species.
McCarthy was born in Rhode Island, reared in Tennessee, and died in his home of natural causes in New Mexico. The son of a lawyer working for the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority, a neat and massive federal project that pipes electricity throughout the boondocks of the Smoky Mountains). He attended a series of Catholic schools and is noted for claiming that even in his small years he saw no value in school, preferring his litany of odd hobbies. He attended the University of Tennessee just long enough to develop an interest in creative writing before dropping out to join the Air Force, where he developed a love for reading in the wild and frigid beauty of Alaska. A few years later, he returned to the University of Tennessee for a bit until he won a writing award and dropped out again, setting his sights on Chicago. There he worked in an auto parts warehouse while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper.
After publishing that first book in 1965 he received a few more awards and grants, but continued to live like a drifter. After he was kicked out of his apartment in New Orleans for being too broke, he jumped on a ship bound for England. There on the high seas he charmed the liner’s singer, and they married after the ship docked in Albion. She would be his second wife. The first one bailed to Wyoming when she got sick of living in an Appalachian shack.
His second novel, Outer Dark, was written while he slummed it around Europe. It was published after he returned to the States with Wife no. 2. The couple moved into a dilapidated dairy barn with no plumbing. There he wrote his third book, Child of God, before his second marriage broke up, and he took off for El Paso.
McCarthy’s next book was an autobiography, Suttree, written while running around Mexico with a 17-year-old Finnish girl. After its publication he moved on to the American Southwest, living in some hovel behind the El Paso mall, where he wrote what is widely considered his gratuitously violent masterpiece, Blood Meridian.
Despite his smattering of awards, his multiple publications, and the acclaim for Blood Meridian, he didn’t experience success until the publication of All the Pretty Horses, the first installment of The Border Trilogy in 1992.
After wrapping up the trilogy, he took a whack at writing a screenplay that ended up as the novel No Country for Old Men. In the early 2000s, while gazing out over the wastes of El Paso with his son from Wife no. 3, he was inspired to write his eternally dreary post-apocalyptic fiction, The Road. After this, he dabbled in some more screenwriting and settled in as the only non-scientist trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, a research facility dedicated to studying complex adaptive systems. His involvement at the institute inspired his first nonfiction essay, “The Kekule Problem”, an analysis of unconscious mental patterns and their separation of language.
He wrote two more novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, before dying at the impressive age of 89.
The Normal Times 