Cormac McCarthy, lauded author of 'The Road', dies at 89

Author Cormac 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 dramatised how the past overwhelmed the present. Photo: AP

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 on Tuesday (June 13). 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.