Unfortunately, Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos actually are, in a phrase that would have probably pissed him off, “novels of ideas.” Or one idea, anyway: In these five novels, Portis wrote America. He went on writing short fiction, non-fiction and a play, and won multiple lifetime achievement awards over the last decade.The entertainment value of his work can trick the unwary into thinking it’s not about much.

Portis wrote three more novels: The Dog of the South, published in 1979, Masters of Atlantis (1985) and Gringos (1991). When the book was first published, Roald Dahl declared it: “The best novel to come my way for a very long time. You’d see them in his books.”ĭonna Tartt described True Grit as a masterpiece in a foreword to a recent edition of the novel, adding that “no living southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the south as artfully as Portis does”. He would hear snatches of conversations or see people who had a particular look and he would take note of that. He preferred to go as an unknown person because he was a people watcher. He was comfortable around his friends, but shy around strangers. I think it didn’t sit well with him,” Jonathan Portis told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “He had this great amount of success with True Grit. A second version in 2010, starring Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld, was directed by the Coen Brothers.

A film version followed in 1969, starring John Wayne in an Academy Award-winning performance. “People do not give it credence that a 14-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,” it opens, with typical deadpan humour. True Grit followed in 1968, telling of how 14-year-old Mattie recruits deputy marshal Rooster Cogburn, a man she believes to have “grit” like her, to help find the man who shot her father. About a Texan who sets out for New York, meeting his true love, the second shortest midget in show business and a chicken on the way, it was described by Entertainment Weekly as “a glimpse of how a 20th-century Mark Twain might write”. He left journalism in 1964 to write full-time, publishing his first novel, Norwood, in 1966. And we are proud of the way he showcased our beautiful state.”īorn and educated in Arkansas, Portis served as a sergeant in the US Marine Corps during the Korean war before becoming a journalist, writing for papers including the New York Herald Tribune. Stephen King said that Portis was a “ true American original”, while the governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson said he “will be remembered for generations to come.

Charles portis author