Arts & Entertainment

Award-winning author Cormac McCarthy dies

New York, Jun 13 (EFE).- Cormac McCarthy, creator of novels such as “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” and hailed by some as being in the tradition of William Faulkner and Herman Melville, died Tuesday, his son said. He was 89.

John McCarthy said that his father died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In late 2022, Cormac McCarthy published a pair of linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” that received positive reviews, and had been at work in the months leading up to his death on a screenplay for a film version of his 1985 novel “Blood Meridian.”

Three of his 12 novels were made into movies in his lifetime.

“All the Pretty Horses,” winner of the 1992 National Book Award, was brought to the screen in 2000 in a film starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz, while the 2007 screen adaptation of “No Country for Old Man,” won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.

“The Road,” which earned McCarthy the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, reached the big screen in 2009 with a cast that included Viggo Mortensen, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron, and Guy Pearce.

Born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., the future author started calling himself Cormac, according to one version of the story, so as not to be known as “Charlie McCarthy,” the dummy of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.

“Blood Meridian,” set in the Mexico and Texas of the 1840s, was praised by critic Harold Bloom as “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying,'” and McCarthy had been mentioned as a potential Nobel literature laureate.

Fluent in Spanish from the time he spent in the mid-1960s living in Ibiza, Spain, McCarthy inserted passages of untranslated Spanish dialogue in several of his works. EFE fjo-magl/dr

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