True Grit - Softcover

Charles Portis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1585679380 ISBN 13: 9781585679386

Publisher: The Overlook Press, 2007

Synopsis

True Grit is the basis for two movies, the 1969 classic starring John Wayne and the Academy Award® 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 this title

About the Author:

Charles Portis lives in Arkansas, where he was born and educated. 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. True Grit is the basis for two movies, the 1969 classic starring John Wayne and the 2010 version starring Academy Award® winner Jeff Bridges and written and directed by the Coen brothers.

Review:

"As entertaining and original as any fiction of recent times." -- St. Louis Dispatch

"Charles Portis is perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America." -- Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire

"True Grit is when you are a 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, and you've just shot a dangerous outlaw and the gun's recoil has sent you backward into a pit, and you are wedged in the pit and sinking fast into the cave below where bats are brushing against your legs, and you reach out for something to hold on to and find a rotting corpse beside you and it's full of angry rattlers, and then it turns out you didn't kill the outlaw, he's up at the rim of the pit laughing at you, about to shoot you-and you don't lose your nerve. That's True Grit." -- Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times

An instant classic...read it and have the most fun you've had reading a novel in years, maybe decades. -- Newsday

About this edition

• Publisher: The Overlook Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1585679380
• ISBN 13: 9781585679386
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224