Tuesday evening the childhood home of a renowned author and UT alum burned to the ground.

The house located in south Knoxville, just outside the city limits, was the childhood home of Cormac McCarthy.  He is the award winning author best known for his novels No Country for Old Men and The Road.

 Units were dispatch at 4:47 p.m. by the Rural Metro Fire Department, and Engine Company 28 was the first to arrive on scene.  

The firefighters reported heavy fire and smoke,  Bill Kear, Rural Metro Fire Department's public information officer, said. The firefighters then entered the house to search for victims. 

 "Because the house was abandoned, we immediately entered a crew into the structure because we did not know if anyone was inside," Kear said.  "But for safety reasons we had to pull them out."

Due to the fire's intensity, firefighters were forced to take up defensive positions to contain it.

 Six units from Rural Metro responded to the fire, and the Knoxville Fire Department sent one unit.

The fire was officially contained around 9 p.m., just a little over four hours after it was reported, but not before most of the house burned to the ground.

McCarthy went to Catholic High School and attended UT, where his first stories were published in the University's Phoenix literary magazine.

Many of his early novels are set in Knoxville and East Tennessee including his first novel The Orchard Keeper.

 In 2007 McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road, and his previous novel No Country For Old Men was made into an Academy Award winning film.

The cause of the fire is still unknown, and on Wednesday morning firefighters were out in the rain going through a clean-up process known as overhauling.  Kear said the firefighters were getting rid of debris and investigating how it started and spread.