Cormac McCarthy in 2011. In books like “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” he took a dark view of the human condition.Credit...Dawn Jones/Professor Productions

Cormac McCarthy, Novelist of a Darker America, Is Dead at 89

“All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders.

Dwight Garner
June 13, 2023

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 on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89.

Albert Manguel / The Truth Is Out There, but Maybe Not in Here

The Truth Is Out There, but Maybe Not in Here

By Dwight Garner

• June 21, 2012

The novelist Edmund White has called biography “the most middle class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great.”

The Argentine writer Alberto Manguel’s new novel, “All Men Are Liars,” is like an Off Broadway elaboration of Mr. White’s cutting observation. It’s a series of uncomfortable interviews with a would-be biographer in which little people approach a great writer’s corpse and leap on and off it like engorged fleas.