“Motel Days” (Oxford American), 2003

When Portis died, he left no indication that he’d saved any of his manuscripts or letters. It seemed the author intended to remain as low-key in his afterlife as he had been during his lifetime. Then, in 2022 a remarkable discovery was made in the basement of a Little Rock home. Workers went into a crawl space to do HVAC work and found huge stacks of papers. Portis, as it turned out, had preserved an archive after all. The recovered materials, which amount to thirteen banker’s boxes, include the manuscripts for all his novels. Most notable are the heavily edited drafts of True Grit that show just how hard Portis worked to make the voice of his unforgettable narrator, Mattie Ross, pitch perfect for her time and place. Portis’s papers also include photographs, personal materials, and voluminous correspondence with friends, family, and fellow writers. Also present are extensive research files, screenplays, articles, and nearly 400 typed pages of a final, unfinished novel set in Veracruz. Demonstrating Portis’s writing methodology, the archive also contains many hundreds of the author’s hand-written “quarter- notes” — letter-sized pages he folded to fit in his shirt pocket so he could jot down observations or thoughts. As a coda, the archive holds hundreds of receipts documenting Portis’s restless travels through Texas and Mexico.