With a career like Cormac McCarthy’s, it’s unsurprising that his military service is summed up in just one or two lines in any biography or obituary one might read. Before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, McCarthy joined the U.S. Air Force in 1953 after dropping out of college.
He served four years; two of those were spent in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show. He also “read a lot of books very quickly” to fight the boredom and monotony of his Air Force life. McCarthy was famously reluctant to do interviews, or to reveal much in the interviews he agreed to.
It’s possible that without those formative years spent counting down the tedious days of his post-Korean War enlistment that he might never have read some of the authors who clearly shaped his work, like Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and especially William Faulkner.
By the time of McCarthy’s death, the author’s body of work included 12 books (including nonfiction work), two plays, three screenplays and three short stories. Six of his works were later adapted into movies, including “The Road,” “No Country for Old Men” and “Child of God.” He died on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, at home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at age 89.
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933. By the time he was 4, his family had relocated to Tennessee, where his father was a high-ranking lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Depression-era government program designed to develop critical infrastructure in the region.
The McCarthys were a well-to-do family, but Cormac (whose birth name was Charles) didn’t feel at home with the elites of Knoxville. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Tennessee for two years before dropping out to join the Air Force in 1953. In 1957, his service was over, and he returned to UT for another stab at college.
His second shot didn’t pan out, either, but he did discover “a knack for language.” It was at the University of Tennessee that he published his first works, a series of short stories for a student magazine. After dropping out the second time, he moved to Chicago. Like many veterans pursuing their goals, he worked a side job to make money. McCarthy’s gig was at an auto parts store.
The novel that came from his time in Chicago was 1965’s “The Orchard Keeper,” published when he was 32 years old. It was well-received and even won a William Faulkner Foundation Award, but it didn’t pay the young author’s bills for long.
“I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this,” he later told The New York Times.
After publishing “The Orchard Keeper,” McCarthy traveled around the country and later Europe. Living on the proceeds from his first book, along with literary grants, he was married and divorced, and then married again. He wrote his second book, “Outer Dark,” while living on Ibiza, an island in the Mediterranean.
He moved back to Tennessee, where he lived in “total poverty” in a barn with his second wife. His wife would divorce him, but he published his third novel, “Child of God,” from the barn. Both books received generally good reviews, but his third one led to writing a screenplay for an episode of the PBS TV series “Visions.”
Through 1991, he published “Suttree,” a semi-autobiographical novel, and ”Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.” His books garnered widespread acclaim from other authors, but didn’t sell more than 5,000 copies, leading some to call him the “best unknown novelist in America.”
Then, in 1992, he published “All the Pretty Horses,” which both won awards and became a New York Times bestseller. The nearly 60-year-old McCarthy continued writing books, but in 2000, “All The Pretty Horses” was adapted into a film starring Matt Damon and directed by Billy Bob Thornton. Hollywood took notice.
“No Country for Old Men,” which McCarthy wrote in 2005, was adapted for the screen by Joel and Ethan Coen in 2007 and won four Oscars, including for Best Picture. “The Road,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written in 2006, was adapted in 2009. His 2006 play “The Sunset Limited” was adapted in 2011. In 2013, actor-writer James Franco turned McCarthy’s 1973 novel “Child of God” into a movie.
In 2012, McCarthy wrote the screenplay for “The Counselor,” which was directed by Ridley Scott (“Black Hawk Down”). Despite his critical success and Hollywood fame, McCarthy had no interest in spending time talking about writing or writers. His real passion was science, and he came to work at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a nonprofit theoretical research facility.
His work as a trustee at SFI came to influence his later works, which include “The Kekulé Problem,” a nonfiction exploration on the origin of language and the unconscious. His 2022 books “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris” are filled with the kind of theoretical ideation that fascinated him at the SFI.
In a 2009 interview with The Wall Street Journal, McCarthy summed up his life’s work and his take on his own success:
“If you’re good at something, it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, ‘The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.’ And when you hear that, you know you’re hearing the truth.”
— Blake Stilwell can be reached at [email protected]. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on LinkedIn.
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