184. Charles Portis, True Grit
The Arkansas writer Charles Portis was taught alongside Hawthorne and Whitman in high school honors English classes in the 1970s, but he had largely disappeared from the American literary consciousness by the late 80s, his works mostly out of print. He has since been resuscitated. The 2012 compendium Escape Velocity, which collects his journalism, travel writing, short stories and memoir, includes his deadpan coverage of a KKK rally in 1963 for the Herald Tribune: “A Ku Klux Klan meeting, for all its cross-burning and hooded panoply, is a much duller affair than one might expect… By 10:30 p.m. one of the crosses had collapsed and the other was just smoldering. Everyone drifted away and the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.”
True Grit (1968) is the straightforward story of a manhunt in the 1870s. It is a pleasure to read and re-read because of its voice, both of narrator Mattie Ross, a strait-laced teenaged girl with an implacable thirst for justice, and of the outlaws and lawmen around her. The book also produced Rooster Cogburn, a Confederate veteran become a louche US marshal, America’s answer to Falstaff.
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 was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.
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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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