On the Death of Cormac McCarthy

I heard the news this afternoon about Cormac McCarthy¹. He was one of the authors I’ve been aware of for a while, one of those people who’s always on the shortlist of Nobel Literature Prize winners (he missed out on that, but he got the Pulitzer for his book The Road).

I’ve thought a bit since then about the idea of literary heroes or idols, writers who not only write stories someone enjoys, but someone who inspires people to be writers themselves. It might seem such idols would inspire others to write like them, or at least begin to do so. Perhaps they might inspire them to apply what they have learned to their own style of writing, or maybe they might be so bold as to think they might have figured out a way to improve on the art and craft of the masters. It’s my personal belief that all of these things can be a possibility, just as much as writers can learn from mistakes and poor writing.

I did not discover McCarthy until well after my formative years as a reader and writer. To be honest, I did not learn about his work until the movie adaptation of No Country for Old Men. I have read some of his work, but not all of it. I would not consider myself someone who necessarily writes like McCarthy - I use more punctuation than he did, for one thing - and I would never consider myself a “literary” or “mainstream” writer as authors like McCarthy are often pidgeonholed as. I’m certainly not the same type of person he was, with similar experiences. But, I can learn things from what he wrote, and he could tell a good story.