Cormac McCarthy, Award-Winning Author Of ‘No Country For Old Men,’ Dies At 89

etcanada.com:

Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who in prose both dense and brittle took readers from the southern Appalachians to the desert Southwest in such novels as “The Road,” “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses,” died Tuesday.

He was 89. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a Penguin Random House imprint, announced that McCarthy died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “For 60 years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement. “Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.” McCarthy, raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, was compared to William Faulkner for his expansive, Old Testament style and rural settings.

McCarthy’s themes, like Faulkner’s, often were bleak and violent and dramatized how the past overwhelmed the present. Across stark and forbidding landscapes and rundown border communities, he placed drifters, thieves, prostitutes and old, broken men, all unable to escape fates determined for them well before they were born.

As the doomed John Grady Cole of McCarthy’s celebrated “Border” trilogy would learn, dreams of a better life were only dreams, and falling in love an act of folly. “Every man’s death is a standing in for every other,” McCarthy wrote in “Cities of the Plain,” the trilogy’s final book. “And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us.” McCarthy’s own story was one of belated, and