A portrait of a specific time, it nevertheless exudes a mythic timelessness. Portis vividly recreates the roughness of an America that is barely a hundred years old and still deciding what kind of country it will be. Also seeking Chaney, for other crimes, is LaBoeuf, a proud, young Texas Ranger, who enters into a sometimes uneasy partnership with the pair.Īs the three track the killer across the still-untamed territory, they find themselves challenged by the landscape and its natural perils, by the deadly enemies they face, and ultimately by one another and their own fears. To aid her in her quest, she seeks a man with a quality she calls 'true grit' and thinks she finds him in Rooster Cogburn, a shabby and overweight but affable federal marshal. In language straightforward but strongly her own, full of feeling but unsentimental, she goes on to relate the tale of her search for her father's murderer, 'a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney,' during a hard winter across the 'Choctaw Nation' in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

In the first line of True Grit, Charles Portis introduces the reader to the engaging voice of Mattie Ross, narrating from old age the great adventure of her life: 'People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.' 'I have never been one to flinch or crawfish when faced with an unpleasant task.' -from True Grit “As for the second favor: do not loan this book out. “Do yourself two favors: read the novel before you see the movie. Published in 1968 as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post, the novel is the fifth and most famous one by Charles Portis, a native of Arkansas who served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, was the London bureau chief of the New York Herald-Tribune, and was a writer for The New Yorker.

Called an “epic and a legend” ( The New York Times Book Review) and “a comic tour de force” ( The Washington Post), the novel tells the story of a 14-year-old girl from Arkansas in the latter part of the 19th century who recruits a one-eyed marshal to help her avenge the murder of her father the two set out during a hard winter across untamed territory to find the drifter who killed him. “True Grit is one of the great American novels, with two of the greatest characters in our literature and a story worthy of their greatness,” writes Newsweek about this rousing Western adventure tale that has inspired two award-winning films. This title will no longer be available for programming after the 2020-21 grant year.

Charles portis novels