Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men,” has died. He was 89.

His death by natural causes was confirmed by his son, John McCarthy, according to a statement from his publisher.

McCarthy was both revered and criticized for his brutally violent, morally ambiguous, often bleak novels in which men were pitted against primal forces, books that read like a sock to the jaw numbed by a slug of whiskey.

McCarthy was born Charles McCarthy Jr. on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, one of six children in an Irish Catholic family. When McCarthy was a child, his family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer. “We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks,” McCarthy told The New York times in a rare interview.

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It was the South where McCarthy drew much of his literary inspiration for his Southern gothic and neo-Western stories, following in the narrative literary tradition of William Faulkner. McCarthy is noted for his style, which employs deceivingly simple, declarative sentences, sparse punctuation, and dialogue free of quotation marks and often missing attribution.