Called 'the original laconic cutup,' 'True Grit' author Charles Portis was one of the country's most revered novelists, but lived a secluded life in his later years.
and writers for such shaggy dog stories as “Norwood” and “Gringos” and a bounty for Hollywood whose droll, bloody western “True Grit” was a bestseller twice adapted into Oscar-nominated films, died Monday at age 86.
In “Norwood,” an ex-Marine from Texas heads East in a suspicious car to collect a suspicious debt, but winds up on a bus with a circus dwarf, a chicken and a girl he just met. “The Dog of the South” finds one Ray Midge driving from Arkansas to Honduras in search of his wife, his credit cards and his Ford Torino. In “Gringos,” an expatriate in Mexico with a taste for order finds himself amid hippies, end-of-the-world cultists and disappearing friends.
Portis was born in 1933 in El Dorado, Ark., one of four children of a school superintendent and a housewife whom Portis thought could have been a writer herself. As a kid, he loved comic books and movies and the stories he learned from his family. In a brief memoir written for the Atlantic Monthly, he recalled growing up in a community where the ratio was about “two Baptist churches or one Methodist church per gin.
Portis placed his stories in familiar territory. He knew his way around Texas and Mexico and worked enough with female stringers from the Ozarks in Arkansas to draw upon them for Mattie’s narrative voice in “True Grit.” He eventually settled in Little Rock, where he reportedly spent years working on a novel that was never released. “Gringos,” his fifth and last novel, came out in 1991.
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