(New York) The American literary giant Cormac McCarthy, who found success late in life thanks to his iconic novels such as So pretty horses or The road, died Tuesday at the age of 89 from natural causes, a announced its publisher.

A chronicler of Appalachian America and the dark and cruel “Wild West”, McCarthy, whose novels were adapted by Hollywood as Oscar-winning “No Country for old men”, died at his home in Santa Fe, Arizona. State of New Mexico.

“His death has been confirmed by his son, John McCarthy,” a statement from publishing giant Penguin Ramdom House said.

Born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island (northeast), this author of 12 novels “was one of the most renowned and influential writers on the planet”, hailed Penguin Random House .

McCarthy has won several prestigious awards in the United States, including a Pulitzer in 2007 for The Road (2006), which recounts a wandering of a father and a son in a country ravaged by a cataclysm of unknown origin.

He did not, however, win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in the statement.

While the novelist found success late in life, “millions of readers around the world have embraced his characters, his mythical themes, and the intimate, genuine emotions he embodied on every page in brilliant novels that will live on forever. both current and timeless for generations to come,” wrote its publisher.

First to react, the famous American writer Stephen King bowed on Twitter to “perhaps the greatest American novelist of [his] time”.

British writer Robert Macfarlane quoted on Twitter a passage from his favorite McCarthy novel Blood Meridian (1985) hailing “an iron pen” and a “way of twisting the tongue” to create “new forms” of literature.

And rock musician Jason Isbell wondered, also on Twitter, “how many of us were influenced” by McCarthy? “An immeasurable number”.

Reclusive and detached from material constraints – he lived for a long time in seedy motels – Cormac McCarthy granted only a handful of interviews to the media.

In one of his rare interviews in 1992 with the New York Times Magazine, McCarty explained his dark view of the human condition: “I think the idea that the human species can somehow to improve, so that everyone can live in harmony, is really a dangerous idea”.

Fifteen years later, in 2007, he told the cultural magazine Rolling Stone that if literature “doesn’t talk about life and death…it doesn’t matter”.