Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Cormac McCarthy RIP

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/novelist-cormac-mccarthy-dead-at-89/

By JEFF ZYMERI
June 13, 2023 5:08 PM
Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer Cormac McCarthy, who wrote novels such as The Road and Blood Meridian, died Tuesday at age 89.

McCarthy’s publisher explained that the writer died of natural causes in his Sante Fe home. “Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,” said Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya. “For 60 years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word.”

Known for his lyrical prose, McCarthy was the author of twelve novels, often apocalyptic Westerns. He also wrote several plays, short stories, and screenplays.

His style was restrained. McCarthy once described his writing as “simple declarative sentences.”

“I believe in periods and capitals and the occasional comma and that’s it,” McCarthy added.

Literary theorist Harold Bloom called McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian the greatest by a living American author and the ultimate Western. “It is as close to being the American prose epic as one can find,” Bloom said.

In Blood Meridian and other novels, McCarthy’s uncompromising approach to death and violence overwhelmed readers. However, “if you read your way into the cosmos of the book,” explained Bloom, “you get a great vision, a frightening vision of what is indeed something deeply embedded in the American spirit, in the American psyche.”

McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for The Road.

His novels were often adapted into films. McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was adapted by the Coen Brothers and starred Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2007.

His last two books — The Passenger and Stella Maris — were released last year. National Review’s Jason Lee Steorts remarked that the two novels “present their wit and erudition as supports from which to consider the inherent burdens of the soul: to feel the shock of our existing and to weigh its mystery as we ought, with the courage of a fair scale but the expectation that it must fail under the burden.”

McCarthy is survived by his sons, Cullen and John, credited by McCarthy as the inspiration for The Road.

Amazing author.

If you haven’t read “The Road” you’re really missing out.

A big loss to the Western Literary world and to those who read his books.

great author

Blood Meridian is a grinder of a book

One of his very best.

Restrained? Anything but, he wrote vivid scenes of extreme violence. As usual the reviewer is full of schit.

I read his books, may you RIP Cormac McCarthy.

The Road ought to be required reading for every father.

As MW said, reviewers are too often FOS.

That book seemed to me to allegorize our society’s savagery with regard to children and the central importance of the strong protection from a violent and hateful world which only a father can provide.

Excellent book.

Well, they can't even spell Santa Fe correctly.

The Road was a yawner.
Way overhyped.

Just finished blood meridian and ordered the road and all the pretty horses this past Sunday.

Blood Meridian was one dark read.
Good, but dark.

Yeah? Try Child of God...

A Great American author

Where’d you get that?
The gitten place...

Long live The Judge..

Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?

I have never understood the fanboi status and ravings for Blood Meridian. One of the most overblown, overhyped books I’ve ever read. Worthy as a doorstop only.

Verbose.

Never a fan of McCarthy

“… the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.”

I read Blood Meridian 4 times complete in the past 10 months. No Country, twice.