US Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy has died aged 89, his publisher has announced.
The writer died of natural causes at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to BBC.
McCarthy’s novels included The Road and No Country for Old Men, both of which were turned into successful films.
Many of his novels were violent tales describing the American frontier and post-apocalyptic worlds. In real life, he was said to be a very private man.
Paying tribute, fellow author Stephen King called him “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time”.
He tweeted: “He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”
McCarthy’s media interviews or appearances on the red carpet were a rarity, according to BBC.
In 2007, he told US talk show host Oprah Winfrey: “I don’t think [interviews] are good for your head.
“If you spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about it, you probably should be doing it.”
The Road, published in 2006, was McCarthy’s 10th novel and won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. It describes a father and son’s arduous journey as they struggle to survive in the US after the apocalypse.
McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1930 in an Irish Catholic family. He was one of six siblings.
But he spent most of his childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer.
