Cormac McCarthy signed just 250 copies of his most acclaimed novel, The Road, and gave them all to his son so he could sell them one day.
The US author’s death was announced Tuesday (13 June). He was 89.
His 2005 novel, No Country for Old Men, was famously adapted by the Coen brothers into a feature film starring Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin. It went on to win four Academy Awards including Best Picture.
It was The Road, though, which earned him a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – one of the literary world’s highest honours.
The book follows a father and son on a gruelling journey of survival in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. McCarthy said his inspiration for the book was his relationship with his son John Francis McCarthy, born in 1999 to his third wife, Jennifer Winkley.
It too was adapted into a film in 2009 starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
McCarthy was famously averse to promoting his own material, despite the frequent Hollywood adaptations.
He rarely granted interviews and details about his life were sparse. In one such interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2009, the author revealed that the only signed copies of The Road were owned by his son, John.
“There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever,” he told the Journal.
Asked how many signed copies existed, McCarthy replied: “250. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, ‘I have a signed copy of the “The Road,’ and I say, ‘No. You don’t.’”
On the rare book trading website AbeBooks, signed copies of McCarthy’s novels are being sold for up to $40,000 (£31,700) due to their scarcity.
After news of McCarthy’s death broke, tributes poured in from across the literary industry. Stephen King called the author “maybe the greatest American novelist of my time”.
McCarthy is also survived by his first son, Cullen McCarthy, born in 1962 to his first wife Lee Holleman. He divorced his second wife, Annie DeLisle, in 1981.
He also has a brother, two sisters and two grandchildren.
