Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of "All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of "The Road,” died Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 89.
Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that his son John had confirmed the death.
McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. "There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. "I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”