Life Events
| Date | Event | Details |
|---|---|---|
20 July 1933 | Birth | 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. |
13 June 2023 | Death | 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. |
Birth20 July 1933
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.
Death13 June 2023
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.
Series (1)
Books (10)
The Orchard Keeper
1965
Set in the hill country of east Tennessee in the years around the Second World War, three men - a boy, an outlaw, and an old man who tends an abandoned orchard - are connected by a killing none of them fully understands. McCarthy's debut establishes the world and the concerns that would occupy his entire career: a vanishing rural America, violence beneath the surface of ordinary life, and the indifference of the natural world.
Outer Dark
1968
In an unnamed Appalachian backwater, a young woman gives birth to her brother's child. He abandons the infant in the woods and tells her the baby died. She sets out across the countryside to find it, while three nameless, violent men move through the same landscape leaving destruction behind them. A spare, relentless novel soaked in biblical dread and folk horror.
