For novelists of Westerns, Cormac McCarthy transcended - and reinvented - the genre

Film directors Ethan Coen, left, and Joel Coen pose with their Oscars for best director and adapted screenplay for their work on 'No Country For Old Men,' which also won the best picture Oscar, at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008. The film is based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. Photo: AP

From the moment he read Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses, James Wade knew he was a fan for life and that his aspirations, as an author of Westerns, would never be the same.

"He really broke free from the traditional Western,” says Wade, a two-time winner of the Spur Award for outstanding Western writing whose novel All Things Left Wild was billed as "an illustration of the violence and corruption prevalent in our fast-expanding country” - a description that could have been applied to much of McCarthy's work.