The #1 New York Times bestselling classic frontier adventure novel, with over two million copies in printTrue Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father’s blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory. First brought to the big screen in the classic 1969 western starring John Wayne and remade brilliantly in 2010 by the Coen brothers and starring Jeff Bridges, True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through. This mass-market edition includes an afterword by bestselling author Donna Tartt.
Charles Portis (1933–2020) lived most of his life in Arkansas, where he was born and raised. He was a graduate of the University of Arkansas, which in 2018 awarded him an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters. He 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. He is the author of four other novels, also available from the Overlook Press: Norwood, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos. A selection of his writing has been collected in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany.
What People are Saying About This
Roald Dahl
"True Grit is the best novel to come my way in a very long time… Marvelous."
John Wayne
I loved that book. Charles Portis got a real Mark Twain feeling, the cynicism and the humor. I tried to buy the book myself.
Jonathan Lethem
Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Charles
Portis's True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice.
From the Publisher
“Tom Wolfe, who worked with Portis as a reporter at the New York Herald-Tribune in the early 1960s called him 'the original laconic cutup.' A generation of novelists since then have simply regarded him as a writers' writer and have made his name a sort of secret password. Soon, they'll no longer have him to themselves.” —Rolling Stone Magazine
'An epic and a legend.' — The Washington Post
'Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Charles Portis's True Grit captures the nanve elegance of the American voice.' — Jonathan Lethem
'An instant classic...Read it and have the most fun you've had reading a novel in years, maybe decades.' — Newsday
'Skillfully constructed, a comic tour de force.' — The New York Times Book Review
'Charles Portis details the savagery of the 1870s frontier through an astonishing narrative voice: that of the 14-year- old Mattie Ross, a flinty, skeptical, Bible-thumping scourge' — Wall Street Journal
'I loved that book. Charles Portis got a real Mark Twain feeling, the cynicism and the humor. I tried to buy the book myself.' — John Wayne
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