'No Such Thing as Life Without Bloodshed'

Cormac McCarthy was almost 60 when he became famous for All The Pretty Horses. It won him the National Book Award in 1992 after some 30 years of publishing novels. He died almost an ancient man, at 89, this week, having recently published a pair of novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, his first in 16 years. Everyone thinks he spent all those silent years being Cormac, somewhere in the Southwestern desert, but none of us know what that means because he was a private man. He knew that people may like to read his prose, enjoy the heartbreak, even terror, and the beautiful sentences, but that no one would want to live like him or consider things the way he did. The age of the novelist is long past. There are no great public funerals or occasions of state. It's an important quality in a writer, an absence of sentimentality.