True Grit (Center Point Western)

Portis, Charles

4.17

59,160 ratings by Goodreads

9781602859371: True Grit (Center Point Western)

ISBN 10: 160285937X ISBN 13: 9781602859371

Publisher: Center Point Pub, 2010

True Grit, first published in 1968 and the basis for the movie by the same name starring John Wayne, tells the story of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross. 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 money. That's when Mattie fearlessly heads out to avenge her father's blood, convincing one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest U.S. Marshal there is, to accompany her. But their plans run into an obstacle -- namely, a Texas Ranger who is also investigating the murder, and whose idea of justice is vastly different from Mattie and Rooster's.

Like Mattie herself, True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching. This is an American classic through and through.

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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

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