Cormac McCarthy, Famed Author of No Country for Old Men and The Road, Has Died

Cormac McCarthy, the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning author of No Country for Old Men, The Road, and many more, has died at the age of 89.

As reported by Variety, McCarthy’s son announced, via his father’s publisher Penguin Random House, that Cormac died from natural causes.

Cormac McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. Throughout his career, he wrote 12 novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, and his focus was on westerns and post-apocalyptic tales.

McCarthy’s first book, “The Orchard Keeper,” was published in 1965. However, he didn’t find his big break until the 1992 National Book Award-winning novel “All the Pretty Horses.” This book, which was the first of a trilogy, was set in West Texas and was adapted into a film in 2000 that starred Matt Damon, Penelope Cruz, and Henry Thomas.

In 2005, McCarthy released No Country for Old Men, which would later be adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen for the big screen in 2008 and star Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, and Josh Brolin. No Country for Old Men told the story of three characters – one who found a ton of money at a crime scene, another who was hired to recover the money, and yet another who was investigating the crime.

In 2006, McCarthy’s The Road was released and told the story of a father and son traversing a version of United States that had undergone an extinction event. This novel won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been hugely influential, especially in the world of video games with titles like The Last of Us.

In 2009, director John Hillcoat led the film adaptation of The Road, which starred Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall.

In April, it was reported that McCarthy’s infamously unfilmable novel Blood Meridian would be getting another feature film attempt. This story was published in 1985 and follows a protagonist in the 1850s known as “the kid” who gets wrapped up in a gang rangers at the border of the US and Mexico.

McCarthy was married three times and is survived by his two sons, Cullen and John Francis.

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.