Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) was an American novelist, author of Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. For more than two decades he was a fixture of the Santa Fe Institute, where he served as a board member and senior fellow and spent much of his time among its scientists, editing their writing and pursuing interests in mathematics, physics, non-human intelligence, and consciousness. Those concerns surface in his last novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris (2022), and in a rare piece of nonfiction, the essay The Kekulé Problem, on the unconscious and the origins of language.