The American writer Cormac McCarthy has passed away

Cormac McCarthy, an American novelist and playwright, a contemporary classic and Pulitzer Prize laureate, passed away at the age of 89 on June 13 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His son, John, informed about his father's death at the writer's home, as reported by The Guardian.

Cormac McCarthy is considered one of the most prominent novelists in the United States. He became well-known for his post-apocalyptic novel "The Road" - a story about a father and son's journey through a desolate country to the south. McCarthy's other critically acclaimed books include "All the Pretty Horses" and "No Country for Old Men," both of which were adapted into films.

McCarthy wrote concise, dense, and austere prose that was compared to the works of authors such as Herman Melville and William Faulkner. He depicted the harsh and dangerous lives of troubled characters. They ranged from Llewelyn Moss in "No Country for Old Men," who is pursued for stolen money, to the unnamed father and son in "The Road," who travel through hellish post-apocalyptic landscapes inhabited by cannibals and marauders.

Other contemporary authors shared their thoughts on the death of their peer. Stephen King wrote on Twitter, "Cormac McCarthy, the greatest American novelist of my time, has died at the age of 89. He lived a full life and left a beautiful body of work, but I still mourn his passing."

For John Banville, McCarthy was an "extraordinary novelist, one of the greatest living writers in America and the world."

Saul Bellow noted McCarthy's "absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences," while literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy's novel "Blood Meridian" not only "the best Western ever," but also "the highest form of dark drama."

Mary Mount, McCarthy's publisher at Picador, said that she and her colleagues "are immensely proud to have been his British publishers for many decades and for the extraordinary number of his works that we have published. He was a writer of vast vision and great beauty, and it was an enormous privilege to hear his voice again in his most recent published works - 'The Passenger' and 'Stella Maris' in 2022."