Cormac McCarthy

Raised in Knoxville, the son of a TVA lawyer, McCarthy left the University of Tennessee without a degree, served four years in the Air Force partly stationed in Alaska, and spent decades afterward in near-total obscurity, living in cheap motels and refusing interviews while a devoted handful of critics kept his early Southern novels in print.

A 1981 MacArthur fellowship let him move to El Paso to research the historical scalp-hunters behind Blood Meridian along the Texas-Mexico border. Success arrived astonishingly late: All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award when he was fifty-nine, and The Road won the Pulitzer when he was seventy-three. He gave his first television interview, to Oprah Winfrey, only after that Pulitzer.

In later years he split his time at the Santa Fe Institute, trading fiction for conversations with physicists and mathematicians, until his death in 2023.