True Grit: A Novel

Front Cover
Overlook, Aug 28, 2007 - Fiction - 240 pages
Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America’s foremost writers. True Grit is the basis for two movies, the 1969 classic starring John Wayne and the Academy AwardŽ winning 2010 version starring Jeff Bridges and written and directed by the Coen brothers.
 
True 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. 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 award-winning Donna Tartt, author of The Little Friend and The Secret History.

About the author (2007)

Charles Portis lives in Arkansas, where he was born (1933) and educated. Portis served as a reporter for the New York Herald-Tribune and was also its London bureau chief. His first novel, Norwood, was published in 1966. His other novels are True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos. True Grit has been made into a movie two times, once in 1969 with John Wayne (who won his only academy award by playing the main character of Rooster Cogburn), and a second time in 2010 with Jeff Bridges as the main character. Mr. Bridges was nominated for the Rooster Cogburn role, but did not win. Charles Portis died on February 17, 2020 in Little Rock, Arkansas at age 86. He had been under hospice care for two years.

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