Charles Portis, author of the Western classic True Grit, dies at 86

August 23, 2024

Charles Portis, a reporter turned novelist known for his deadpan humor and plain-spoken style, most notably in the Western classic “True Grit” — a blood-soaked coming-of-age tale that was adapted into two acclaimed films — died Feb. 17 at a hospice center in Little Rock, Ark. He was 86.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, said his brother Jonathan Portis.

Mr. Portis was a master of shaggy-dog stories set on the American frontier or just beyond the Southern border, where his characters journeyed to recoup a debt, mete out justice or track down a runaway spouse. His five novels were populated by con artists, circus performers and conspiracy theorists — misfits, primarily, whose contrarian nature seemed to evoke that of their creator, a native Arkansan with a gruff independent streak.

Described by Tom Wolfe as “the original laconic cutup,” Mr. Portis was an expert raconteur, although he routinely declined interviews and avoided all publicity, drawing comparisons to literary hermits like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger. While he was not quite a recluse, appearing at Little Rock bars to make small talk with the regulars, he made headlines after attending a 2010 gala to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Oxford American, a Southern literary magazine. He reportedly sat in the 14th row, as far from the stage as he could manage.

Praised by authors as varied as Nora Ephron, George Pelecanos and Donna Tartt, Mr. Portis developed a literary reputation that far outranked his sales. By 1998, when author and journalist Ron Rosenbaum called him “our least-known great novelist,” four of his five books were out of print; the exception, “True Grit” (1968), had appeared for 22 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, only to be eclipsed for many viewers by the 1969 film adaptation, which earned John Wayne his sole Academy Award for acting.

In an Esquire essay, Rosenbaum wrote that Mr. Portis was “perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America,” a writer “who captures the secret soul of twentieth-century America with the clarity, the melancholy, and the laughter with which Gogol captured the soul of nineteenth-century Russia in ‘Dead Souls.’ ”

His literary career began as a shock in 1964, when Mr. Portis announced that he was trading journalism for fiction and moving from London — where he had spent a year as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune — to a cabin on the shores of Lake Norfork in Arkansas.

“A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too ... perfect to be true, and yet there it was,” Wolfe later wrote in New York magazine.

Mr. Portis had previously distinguished himself as a feature writer with stories on Salinger, Malcolm X and the civil rights movement in the South. In Arkansas, he brought his eye for revealing and unusual details to his first novel, “Norwood” (1966), about a retired Marine who travels from Texas to New York and back, collecting $70, rescuing an oracular chicken and falling for a woman on a Trailways bus along the way.

His later novels included “The Dog of the South” (1979), about Raymond E. Midge’s effort to track down a man who has run off with his wife, credit cards and beloved Ford Torino; “Masters of Atlantis” (1985), centered on Lamar Jimmerson’s quest to spread the wisdom of the ancient lost city of Atlantis; and “Gringos” (1991), which followed a treasure-seeking American expat in Mexico. (“You put things off,” he declares, “and then one morning you wake up and say — today I will change the oil in my truck.”)

But his masterpiece was “True Grit,” which told the story of Mattie Ross, an Arkansas farm girl who employs a one-eyed U.S. marshal (Rooster Cogburn) and a young Texas Ranger (LaBoeuf) to avenge her father’s murder. Serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, it was a rare period piece for Mr. Portis, who set the novel in the 1870s and told it through Ross’s character decades later, in a voice by turns stiff and defiant.

“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,” she declares in the opening lines.

In addition to the 1969 film adaptation, which starred Glen Campbell and Kim Darby in addition to Wayne as Cogburn, the crusty hero, “True Grit” was remade by the Coen brothers in 2010. Starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Hailee Steinfeld, it received 10 Oscar nominations and was credited with hewing closer to Mr. Portis’s novel, which ended as it began, with bloodshed and a touch of nostalgia.

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“Time just gets away from us,” Mr. Portis wrote.

The second of four children, Charles McColl Portis was born in El Dorado, Ark., on Dec. 28, 1933. His father taught high school English and history and later worked as a superintendent; his mother was a homemaker who also contributed feature stories to Little Rock newspapers.

Mr. Portis graduated from high school in nearby Hamburg, not far from the Louisiana border. Against his parents’ wishes, he enlisted in the Marines and fought in Korea, where he began reading “book after book,” according to his brother Jonathan.

He eventually mustered out a sergeant and enrolled at the University of Arkansas with vague plans to focus on writing. “You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism,” Mr. Portis later said. “I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college — not to offend the barbers. They probably provide a more useful service.”

After graduating in 1958, he worked at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis and the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock. Joining the Herald Tribune in 1960, he immersed himself in a New York journalism scene that included Jimmy Breslin, Wolfe and Ephron, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter and filmmaker.

“Charlie was just charming, the life of the party almost,” Ephron told the New York Times in 2010. “But he was a newspaper reporter who didn’t have a phone. The Trib had to make him get one. So even back then the pattern was there.”

After turning to fiction, Mr. Portis traveled frequently to Mexico, where he completed “True Grit.” The movie adaptation spurred a 1970 film version of his first novel, “Norwood,” starring Campbell, Darby and Joe Namath.

Some of Mr. Portis’s reporting and short fiction was collected in a 2012 anthology, “Escape Velocity,” published more than two decades after the release of his last novel. He had reportedly been working on another novel late in life, although Jonathan Portis said that after his brother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2012, they found no manuscript or unfinished material in his home.

“I just don’t think he was very sentimental about stuff that he didn’t think was working,” Jonathan said. “If it didn’t seem right to him, I think he just threw it away.”

Mr. Portis never married. In addition to his brother Jonathan, survivors include another brother.

In a phone interview, Jonathan Portis recalled that his literary sibling “was uncomfortable with fame,” and in general felt that he had said all he needed to say through his novels and stories. When the first “True Grit” movie was released, Jonathan said, his brother unsuccessfully attempted to block a Democratic Party fundraiser centered around the movie premiere in Little Rock.

Mr. Portis was a Democrat at the time, his brother said, but didn’t want his work to be politicized. After the party went ahead with the fundraiser screening, “he rented a movie theater in Hot Springs and had his own premiere. He didn’t have any celebrities come there.” The proceeds were donated to the Arkansas Children’s Colony, a center for children with mental disabilities.

“There was a certain pugnacity,” he added, “to the gentleman that we all knew.”

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