Renowned Knoxville author Cormac McCarthy dies at 89

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Cormac McCarthy spent much of his career penning gripping novels that brought readers to some of the most obscure corners of East Tennessee. He died Tuesday at 89 years old.

McCarthy died of natural causes in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher Alfred A. Knopf said.

As the author of Suttree, The Road, Child of God and several other novels — McCarthy’s novels often centered on the place he called home for years. 

McCarthy was born in Rhode Island and grew up in Knoxville.  He attended the University of Tennessee, where he began writing short fiction. He was compared to William Faulkner for his 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.

►Watch: ‘He had a certain passion about life’: Long-time friend remembers renowned author Cormac McCarthy

The home of one of Suttree’s main characters, Gene Harrogate, was set around two blocks away from Market Square underneath the Hill Avenue Viaduct. It is known as “Harrogate’s Retreat” or “Harrogate’s Lair,” according to a historian who previously spoke about McCarthy’s novels.

Jack Neely wrote and researched a walking guide meandering through the downtown Knoxville area, Fort Sanders, and several corners of the city to show people about the city’s literary history. The locales served as backdrops for authors of many kinds, including McCarthy.

He also took his career to the mountains surrounding Knoxville, setting his horror novel Child of God in the area of Sevier County.

He won a Pulitzer for his novel, The Road, which follows a father and his son through a burned U.S. The haunting story took readers to areas of the country often unvisited in novels, while also exploring the tenderness between the two’s relationship that kept them moving through the bleak landscape.

He also wrote No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Blood Meridian.

“Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature. For sixty years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft, and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word,” Nihar Malaviya, CEO of Penguin Random House, said. “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.”

One Knox SC posted about his death on social media, calling him “one of the greatest ever.” They also quoted him in the post.

“For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be,” they said.

As an adult, he lived around the Great Smoky Mountains before moving West in the late 1970s, eventually settling in Santa Fe. His Knoxville boyhood home, long abandoned and overgrown, was destroyed by fire in 2009.