Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, dead at 89

SANTA FE, N.M. — Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Road” and whose novel “No Country for Old Men,” was the basis for an Academy Award-winning movie, died Tuesday. He was 89.

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McCarthy died at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to Knopf, his publisher, The Washington Post reported. Knopf said the cause of death was natural causes.

McCarthy also was known for his “Border Trilogy” — All the Pretty Horses (1992), 1994′s The Crossing (1994) and 1998′s Cities of the Plain (1998) — according to The Hollywood Reporter.

McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 for “The Road,” a haunting novel about the journey of a father and his son through a desolate world.

According to the Post, McCarthy explored the dark side of human nature in his unsentimental novels.

“If it doesn’t concern life and death,” McCarthy once told Rolling Stone, “it’s not interesting.”

None of his first five books sold more than 3,000 hardcover copies, according to the Post. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965) won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel, USA Today reported.

McCarthy’s novel, “No Country for Old Men,” was adapted into a movie by the Coen brothers in 2007 that earned Oscars for best picture, best supporting actor, best director and best adapted screenplay, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, one of six children, USA Today reported. When McCarthy was a child, his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer.

“We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks,” McCarthy once told The New York Times.

McCarthy received the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for “All the Pretty Horses,” a romantic western, the Post reported.

He refused to teach creative writing, calling it a hustle, according to the newspaper. McCarthy never did a book tour or gave public readings. He told The Wall Street Journal that he signed 250 copies of “The Road” and gave them all to his younger son John, “so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever.”