True Grit: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1468306294 ISBN 13: 9781468306293

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2012

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:

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.

Review:

“A wonderful book.... That’s really what the Coens are referencing, and that’s what I’m doing as well”
—Jeff Bridges

“An epic and a legend.”
—The Washington Post

“Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Charles Portis’s True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“An instant classic....Read it and have the most fun you’ve had reading a novel in years, maybe decades.” —Newsday

“Skillfully constructed, a comic tour de force.” —The New York Times Book Review

“I loved that book. Charles Portis got a real Mark Twain feeling, the cynicism and the humor. I tried to buy the book myself.”
—John Wayne

“Mattie Ross is an authentic heroine––lean, mean, articulate and downright inspirational”
—The Washington Times