America Has Lost a Literary Giant

America has lost one of its literary giants. Cormac McCarthy, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Road and numerous other acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, has died at age 89. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says McCarthy died of natural causes Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the BBC reports. McCarthy grew up Knoxville, Tennessee and his work was often "compared to William Faulkner for his Old Testament style and rural settings," per the AP.

After McCarthy moved to the Southwest in the 1970s, the settings for his novels shifted to the region and his prose became more austere, earning comparisons to Ernest Hemingway, the New York Times reports. In recent years, McCarthy had been seen as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, with critic Harold Bloom calling him one of the four great American novelists of his time, the Times reports. Bloom ranked McCarthy alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. The Coen Brothers turned McCarthy's 2005 novel No Country for Old Men into an Oscar-winning film in 2007. Last year saw his first new releases since 2006's The Road, linked novels The Passenger and Stella Maris.

McCarthy was little-known before age 60, when All the Pretty Horses became his first best-seller, the AP notes. He rarely gave interviews, though he appeared on Oprah Winfrey's show in 2007. He said he didn't think interviews are "good for your head," per the BBC. "I f you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn't be thinking about it, you probably should be doing it." Stephen King paid tribute to McCarthy Tuesday, calling him "maybe the greatest American novelist of my time." "He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing," King tweeted. (More Cormac McCarthy stories.)