Cowboy with a killer phrase: the wild life and dazzling prose of Cormac McCarthy

He gave few interviews, read ‘Moby Dick’ eight times a year, and overcame penury and heavy drinking to deliver 12 novels full of grit, beauty and violence. Martin Chilton remembers American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who has died at the age of 89

A portrait of Cormac McCarthy from the dust jacket of his debut novel, ‘The Orchard Keeper’, in 1965 (Joe Blackwell)

I can’t explain how one creates a novel,” Cormac McCarthy told Tennessee’s Kingsport Times in 1973. “It’s like jazz musicians. They create as they play.”

McCarthy, who died at his home in Santa Fe yesterday (13 June) at the age of 89, may not have been able to explain his genius, but his body of work – 12 novels including classics such as All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men and The Road – are towering achievements that place him as one of the greatest authors of modern times.

Born on 20 July 1933, the eldest child of an eminent Rhode Island lawyer, McCarthy was christened Charles Jr – the Gaelic equivalent Cormac was bestowed on him by Irish aunts – and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, as a child. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it,” he later remarked. After dropping out of education, he joined the US Air Force. Bored with barracks life in Alaska, he became a voracious reader, admitting, “I read a lot of books very quickly.” During a post-military career of odd-jobbing, including motor mechanic work in Chicago, he decided to write. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published when he was 32, submitted on spec to Random House’s Albert Erskine, editor of William Faulkner.