QUICK TAKES - Jan. 29, 2009

The boyhood home of Pulitzer-winning author Cormac McCarthy, long abandoned and overgrown, has been destroyed by a fire even as preservationists tried in recent months to save it.

“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 in Knoxville, Tenn., 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.