The immense talent of the American novelist Cormac McCarthy, who has died aged 89, was for three decades a secret that circulated from hand to hand between a small number of readers, but among them were some influential champions of his work.

Gordon Lish, senior editor at the New York publishers Alfred A Knopf, gave a copy of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) to the critic Harold Bloom. Bloom loved it, declaring it a great book, right up there with William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. There are pages of prose in his work, remarked George Steiner, “that may be at the moment the most electric, the most violent, the most inventive prose being written”. Saul Bellow bullied and cajoled the prize committee of the MacArthur Foundation in 1981 to acknowledge McCarthy’s remarkable talent.

McCarthy seemed to come from nowhere and for most of his career wrote in the hermit-like obscurity of a JD Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. Refusing all attempts to publicise his work, McCarthy politely declined to be interviewed, never signed copies of his own books, attended no literary conferences, did not teach, and was more interested in science and cosmology than fiction. He was an American original.

Working at first in the southern gothic mode, he remade himself as a southwestern writer after settling in Texas in 1976. He carried the influence of Faulkner, Herman Melville (Moby Dick was reportedly his favourite novel) and Ernest Hemingway along with him, and remained true to the literary values that those richly complex writers had made their own. McCarthy had no time for Marcel Proust or Henry James; he had no interest in the psychological intricacies of motivation, sensibility or modernist thinking about consciousness. His novels, early and late, were grim, violent tales of life stripped down to the raw fundamentals of existence in a hostile world.

Acclaim and a mass readership came late in his career. Until the runaway success of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 (his first New York Times bestseller), McCarthy had sold fewer than 5,000 copies of the hardback edition of any of his novels. By 2006, Blood Meridian, a blood-dripping tale of scalp-hunting and massacres in northern Mexico in the 1840s, was placed at No 3 in a Time magazine list of the 25 greatest American novels. McCarthy seemed the real deal to readers such as Bloom, Lish and Bellow. He reached an even wider audience via film adaptations of books including No Country for Old Men (2005) and the Pulitzer prize-winner The Road (2006). Not since Faulkner had an American author been so extravagantly talented and, by choice, so distant from the literary culture.

McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the eldest son and third of six children of Gladys (nee McGrail) and Charles McCarthy. The family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937 when his father, a Yale law school graduate, was appointed legal counsel for the Tennessee Valley Authority. Growing up in a large Roman Catholic family in the fiercely Protestant environment of Tennessee, McCarthy was sent to exclusively Catholic schools in Knoxville. Neither the family’s religion, nor their comfortable upper-middle-class life (maids, a large family house), was much to his liking. He did not want to be respectable, and this was not popular in the McCarthy household.

McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee in 1951-52, studying physics and engineering, but dropped out. He had no career ambitions, hated “progress” and rejected most of the expectations that shaped the lives of his siblings and fellow students. He had been named after his father, and the decision legally to change his name from Charles to the Gaelic Cormac suggests some of the family tensions that shaped McCarthy’s relations to his family.

In 1953 McCarthy enlisted in the US air force, and was sent to Alaska, where he had much time to catch up on his reading. He also hosted a programme on a local radio station. After his military service ended in 1956, McCarthy re-enrolled at the University of Tennessee where, as “CJ McCarthy, Jr”, he published two short stories in a campus literary magazine. They attracted some attention, and he received the university’s Ingram-Merrill award for creative writing in 1959.

He promptly left the university without taking a degree, and went to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse. In 1961 he married Lee Holleman, a fellow student from the University of Tennessee. They had a son, Cullen, moved back south to Asheville, North Carolina, and were divorced soon after. When asked years later about whether he paid alimony, he responded: “With what?” He was, for the next 25 years, poor, rootless and happy.

In Chicago, Asheville, and then in New Orleans, he worked on the manuscript of his first novel, The Orchard Keeper. Knowing little of the literary scene, and less of the publishing industry, he sent the novel unsolicited to Random House, where it was plucked from the slush pile of doubtful self-submitted manuscripts and reached the desk of Albert R Erskine, vice-president and editorial director. Erskine was a legendary figure in the world of literary publishing, but even with his support, The Orchard Keeper (1965) – a Faulkneresque tale set in rural Tennessee in the inter-war years, portraying the relationship of a young boy to an outlaw and bootlegger who has murdered the boy’s father – attracted little attention.

Nonetheless, McCarthy received the William Faulkner Foundation award for the best first novel by an American writer. Erskine’s enthusiasm for McCarthy’s talent was undiminished, despite the commercial failures that followed. McCarthy remained a Random House author until his editor’s retirement in 1987.

The Orchard Keeper also won McCarthy a travelling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On his sea voyage to Europe for a planned visit to Ireland, he met Anne DeLisle, a young British singer and dancer, who was working as an entertainer on the ship. They married in 1966, and lived in a rented finca in Ibiza in a boozy community of expatriate American artists and writers. In that happy milieu McCarthy wrote Outer Dark, a tale of incest and violence, in a note-perfect recreation of the Tennessee poor-white vernacular. It was published in 1968, and sank without trace.

A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled the couple to return to the US in some style for DeLisle’s first visit to McCarthy’s parents. When they reached Tennessee, they rented a cottage adjacent to a pig farm south of Knoxville, where they lived for 10 years. McCarthy poured the memory of his life in Knoxville into a long autobiographical novel, Suttree, which appeared in 1979, telling the story of a young man who turned away from a privileged family background and chose to live on a houseboat boozing with a colourful assortment of locals.

With Suttree in mid-draft, he walked out on DeLisle, and moved to El Paso, Texas. Although they divorced, he continued to send drafts of Suttree to DeLisle in Knoxville for typing, and they remained close friends. “I lived waiting for him to come home for years and years,” she recalled. “I never would have stayed there unless I thought he was coming back to me.”

McCarthy received a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation in late December 1981 informing him that he had been awarded a “genius grant” of $500,000, which enabled him to buy a small stucco house behind a shopping mall in El Paso. The Nobel-prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann was the director of the MacArthur Foundation, and he and McCarthy became close friends. Invited by Gell-Mann to affiliate with the Santa Fe Institute, a freewheeling thinktank for scientists, McCarthy at last found an intellectual home. In 1999, with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John, he settled down in Tesuque, New Mexico, and worked on his later novels in his office at the institute, pecking away on a small portable Olivetti Lettera 32. “I like being around smart, interesting people, and the people who come here are among the smartest, most interesting people on the planet.”

The move to El Paso began a new phase for McCarthy. His books up to Suttree were “southern” novels, written strongly under the influence of Faulkner. With Blood Meridian, he wrote about southwest Texas and the Mexican border territory, which he explored in an old pickup truck. His descriptions of the cauterised border territory were stunningly vivid. Bloom claimed that the landscape in Blood Meridian was better than anything except Shakespeare.

The novel’s violence was also spectacular, though oddly affectless. Death comes helter-skelter for the killers and innocent villagers alike in northern Mexico in the 1840s – scalpings, evisceration, beheadings, presented in detail. The motives for this gory mayhem, conducted by contract killers selling Apache scalps to the governor of Sonora, are unfathomable. The figure of Judge Holden takes motiveless malignity to sickening heights. Philip Roth, a novelist whose interests never involved skinning knives, rifles or clubs, found nothing of interest in Blood Meridian; it was described as an ambitious and sophisticated failure in the New York Times, and sold fewer than 1,500 copies in the first printing. A film adaptation was talked about, but the consensus seems to have been that it was unfilmable: too dark, too violent. Asked about this, McCarthy robustly dismissed these objections as “all crap”.

In the early 1990s, McCarthy acquired a new publisher (Knopf), a new editor (Gary Fisketjon) and, for the first time in his career, an agent (Amanda Urban). In 1992 Fisketjon and Urban persuaded the reluctant author to give an interview to the New York Times. All the Pretty Horses appeared that spring, and was a runaway success, winning the National Book award for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle award. In 2000, it was made into a film directed by Billy Bob Thornton. Matt Damon played John Grady Cole and Penélope Cruz played Alejandra, both rather miscast playing adolescents.

McCarthy thought the movie “could’ve been better” and bought a new pickup truck with the income from the book. It was the first volume in the Border trilogy, and was followed in 1994 by The Crossing, and in 1998 by Cities of the Plain. Most of the elements of his earlier books are here: virtuoso descriptive powers, laconic dialogue, a set of engaging younger characters and his signature violence. Occasional flights of inflated rhetoric accompanied McCarthy’s search for deep meaning. His account of the doomed relationship between John Grady Cole and the beautiful Alejandra is suggested by: “As she walked toward him her beauty seemed to him a thing altogether improbable” – which was hard to disagree with.

No Country for Old Men, published in 2005, was dismissed by the critic James Wood as “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller”. The Coen brothers movie of 2007 revealed the perfect geometry of this violent tale of pursuit and revenge. Tommy Lee Jones led the cast superbly as craggy Sheriff Bell, Javier Bardem was Chigurh, the remorseless killer with the bad haircut, and Josh Brolin was the outgunned man who found the drug money.

McCarthy attended the Academy Awards with the Coens. “They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans,” he recalled. “One of the first awards they got was for best screenplay, and Ethan came back with the Oscar trophy and said to me, ‘Well, I didn’t do anything, but I’m keeping it.’”

The Road appeared in 2006, a spare, powerful novel portraying the struggle of a father and his young son to survive in a world in which civilisation, and the ecosystem, has collapsed after an (unspecified) cataclysm. It received the best reviews of his career. The experience of fatherhood is seen powerfully in this novel, as are the doom-laden seminars at the Santa Fe Institute discussing entropy, climate change and Carl Sagan’s widely-read scenario on nuclear winter. Together they offered McCarthy a subject that was perfectly matched to his late prose, muscular and taut.

For a writer never much known for his concern for intense emotional attachment, the feelings of the (unnamed) father for his son was something new in McCarthy; it gave The Road an emotional depth. There are hints of a consoling, redemptive ending, unknown in his earlier books, but the stronger note is a sense of the inevitability of death, of a father’s bitter knowledge that he will leave his young son to make his own way in the blasted world.

The Road was filmed by the Australian director John Hillcoat in 2008. Joe Penhall’s screenplay stayed close to the book’s dialogue (McCarthy explained it had been basically transcribed from conversations with his son John). Filmed mainly in Pittsburgh in midwinter, the film embodied McCarthy’s sense of a world dying. The relationship between father and son, played by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee, preserved much of the novel’s intensity of affection.

McCarthy received the PEN/Saul Bellow award in 2009, given to an American fiction writer whose work “possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature”.

Two late novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, appeared in 2022, capstones to an intense and remarkable career.

McCarthy’s third marriage ended in divorce in 2006. He is survived by his sons, two grandchildren, and two sisters and a brother.

• Cormac McCarthy (Charles Joseph McCarthy), novelist, born 20 July 1933; died 13 June 2023