"We have lost a literary landmark," Kim Trent, executive director of the nonprofit Knox Heritage group, said Wednesday, a day after the two-story wood-frame structure was reduced to a smoldering ruin.
It was a blow for a city that also failed to save the early homes of Pulitzer-winning writer James Agee and poet Nikki Giovanni.
"When something like this happens, it puts a sense of urgency" into preservation efforts, Trent said. "All it takes is somebody with a match and it is gone forever."
Neighbors reported the fire around 5 p.m. Tuesday. The cause was under investigation, said Bill Kear, spokesman for the Rural Metro Fire Department. Investigators say a homeless person may have been staying there, although nobody was in the home when firefighters arrived.
McCarthy, born in Rhode Island in 1933, came to Knoxville at age four when his father became an attorney for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The McCarthys and their six children moved into the 10-room, two-bath home at 5501 Martin Mill Pike in 1941.
The house, which may have been built around a pre-Civil War log cabin, was McCarthy's home for at least a decade until he graduated from Catholic High School, and possibly while attending the University of Tennessee for a year before joining the Air Force in 1953.
He came back to UT for two more years in 1957-1959, but left before graduating. As an adult, he lived in other homes closer the Great Smoky Mountains before moving West in the late 1970s. He now resides in Sante Fe, N.M.
Wes Morgan, a clinical psychology professor at the University of Tennessee and McCarthy devotee, said he believes the Knoxville home remained special to McCarthy and was the model for the father's homestead in McCarthy's 2007 Pulitzer-winning book "The Road" about a father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
"The day following some few miles south of the city at a bend in the road and half lost in the dead brambles they came upon an old frame house with chimneys and gables and a stone wall," according to a passage from the book. "The man stopped. Then he pushed the cart up the drive."
"'What is this place, Papa?"' the son says.
"'It's the house where I grew up,"' his father replies.
Trent said a group of McCarthy fans were interested in buying and restoring the house, which her organization listed among the city's most endangered local places in 2008. But she said she could never locate the owner. McCarthy's parents sold the house in 1967 and moved to Washington, D.C.
McCarthy's other works include "All the Pretty Horses" and "No Country for Old Men," which was made into a 2007 movie that won an Oscar for best motion picture.
