Born Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr. in Providence, Rhode Island, he was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and briefly attended the University of Tennessee before serving four years in the US Air Force. His debut novel The Orchard Keeper was published in 1965. For much of his career he was a writer's writer - critically revered but with a small readership - until the Border Trilogy brought him a mainstream audience in the 1990s. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. He was notoriously press-shy, granting very few interviews across six decades, and continued writing on a typewriter throughout his career. Harold Bloom placed him alongside Melville and Faulkner in the American literary tradition.

Died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged 89. By the time of his death McCarthy had won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Harold Bloom had placed him alongside Melville and Faulkner in the American literary canon. His final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, were published in 2022, the year before his death.