Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dies at 89

variety.com:

Carmel Dagan Cormac McCarthy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who endured decades of obscurity and poverty before film versions of “All the Pretty Horses,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road” brought him a wide readership and financial security, died Tuesday in Santa Fe, N.M.

His publisher, Penguin Random House, said his son John McCarthy announced his death from natural causes. He was 89.Extremely reclusive, McCarthy shunned publicity so effectively that one critic observed, “He wasn’t even famous for it.” But Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2008 adaptation of 2005 novel “No Country for Old Men” put him momentarily in the limelight; the crime thriller, which starred Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin, won Oscars for best picture, director, adapted screenplay and supporting actor.

While McCarthy’s first novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” was published in 1965, commercial success eluded him until his 1992 National Book Award-winning “All the Pretty Horses” and the film version in 2000 began to turn his career around.Set in west Texas between 1949-1951, “Pretty Horses” was the first in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, followed by “The Crossing” in 1994 and “Cities of the Plain” in 1998.

But the film, directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon, Penelope Cruz and Henry Thomas, opened to mostly negative reviews.Peter Biskind reports in his book “Down and Dirty Business” that Thornton had been forced to cut an hour from the film by producer-distributor Harvey Weinstein, though critics questioned whether the additional footage would have improved the movie’s “arty imagery and leaden pace.”In 2009 John Hillcoat directed a powerful film version of McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 novel “The Road.” A