Cormac McCarthy Has Died

The writer Cormac McCarthy has died. But not before this bit of pessimism, from a 1992 interview with the New York Times:

McCarthy wrote All the Pretty Horses, which is a fabulous novel if you can adjust to his clipped, acerbic writing style that wonderfully sets the tone for the story and its location. 

He also wrote Blood Meridian, which is now near the top of my reading list. I hear it's extremely violent, so much so that some people have stopped reading it out of revulsion and disgust. Today the NY Times called it "a bad dream of a Western." And he wrote the books on which two popular movies were based: The Road and No Country For Old Men, neither full of lollipops and rose petals. The former is set in an apocalyptic western Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up, which some people consider the northernmost edge of Appalachia, one of McCarthy's two favorite locales (the other being the American southwest). He himself grew up in eastern Tennessee, of which he said, "We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks."

He started college studying physics and engineering. After the Air Force he got serious about writing:

After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack. While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.

Here's an interesting picture of him when he was young, about 40:

Classic '70s look.