American literary giant Cormac McCarthy, who later found success with cult novels such as All the Pretty Horses and The Road, died on Tuesday at the age of 89 of natural causes, his publisher announced. .

McCarthy, a chronicler of the American Appalachians and the bleak and brutal Wild West, whose novels were adapted by Hollywood into the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, died at his home in Santa Fe, a New Mexico village.

“His death was confirmed by his son, John McCarthy,” Penguin Ramdom House said in a statement.

Charles McCarthy, born July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island (NE), author of 12 novels, “was one of the most famous and influential writers on the planet,” hailed Penguin Random House.

McCarthy won several prestigious awards in the United States, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road (2006), which tells the story of the wanderings of a father and son in a country devastated by a cataclysm of unknown origin.

On the other hand, he did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya exclaimed in a statement.

Although the novelist achieved success late in life, “millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate, real emotions he embodied on every page in brilliant novels that will live on as both relevant and timeless for there will be generations,” wrote his publisher.

A recluse and removed from material constraints – he lived in dusty motels for a long time – Cormac McCarthy gave only a few interviews to the media.

In one of his rare interviews in 1992 with The New York Times Magazine, McCarthy explained his dark view of the human condition: “I think the idea that man can be somehow improved so that everyone can live in harmony, is actually a dangerous idea.”

A decade and a half later, in 2007, he told the cultural magazine Rolling Stone that if literature “doesn’t talk about life and death (…), it has no interest.”