Charles Portis

Charles Portis (born December 28, 1933, El Dorado, Arkansas, U.S.—died February 17, 2020, Little Rock, Arkansas) was an American novelist whose works were admired for their deadpan comic tone, colourfully sketched characters, and spirit of adventure. He was best known for the novel True Grit (1968), which inspired two popular film adaptations (1969 and 2010).

Portis grew up in a series of small towns in southern Arkansas. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served in the Korean War, eventually attaining the rank of sergeant. Upon his discharge in 1955, he enrolled in the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in journalism three years later. Portis worked as a reporter for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee, and the Arkansas Gazette (now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) before being hired in 1960 by the New York Herald-Tribune, for which he frequently covered the civil rights movement. In 1963 he was assigned to the newspaper’s London bureau, but he returned to Arkansas a year later to devote himself to writing fiction full-time.

Portis debuted as a novelist with Norwood (1966; film 1970), the tale of a cheerfully naive ex-marine who wanders from state to state in an attempt to collect a $70 debt. Though some critics found the novel to be thinly plotted, Portis was praised for his memorable characters, especially the numerous eccentrics and outcasts the protagonist encounters during his travels, and for his facility with dialogue. In True Grit, set in Arkansas in the 1870s, Portis told the unsentimental story of Mattie Ross, a headstrong 14-year-old girl avenging her father’s murder with the help of Rooster Cogburn, an ornery, grizzled deputy U.S. marshal. The novel borrows many of the stock conventions of the western genre but artfully combines them with both a realistic sense of place and a dry wit. Owing in part to its serialization in the Saturday Evening Post, True Grit became a best seller. Having earned comparisons to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, it is generally considered Portis’s masterpiece.

After more than a decade of virtual inactivity, Portis returned to the literary scene with The Dog of the South (1979). The picaresque novel follows a bookish man’s meandering journey from Arkansas to Belize in search of his estranged wife and his car. In the similarly episodic Masters of Atlantis (1985), Portis humorously skewered secret societies and cults with his depiction of an organization devoted to preserving the esoteric wisdom of the island of Atlantis. The quest for another ancient civilization, a lost city in the jungles of Mexico, animates the plot of Gringos (1991), which, like much of Portis’s work, is populated with an assortment of itinerant misfits. Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany (2012) contains various writings, including essays and short fiction. Throughout his oeuvre, Portis portrayed the restless pursuit of belief or adventure as emblematic of the American character.