Cormac McCarthy obituary

For most of his career, Cormac McCarthy wrote in obscurity, declined to be interviewed and refused attempts to publicise his work. Photograph: Beowulf Sheehan/Penguin Random House/PA

The immense talent of the American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who has died aged 89, was for three decades a secret that circulated from hand to hand between a small number of readers, but among them were some influential champions of his work.

Gordon Lish, senior editor at the New York publishers Alfred A Knopf, gave a copy of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) to the critic Harold Bloom. Bloom loved it, declaring it a great book, right up there with William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. There are pages of prose in his work, remarked George Steiner, “that may be at the moment the most electric, the most violent, the most inventive prose being written”. Saul Bellow bullied and cajoled the prize committee of the MacArthur Foundation in 1981 to acknowledge McCarthy’s remarkable talent.