Charles Portis Accessions

Born in 1933, Charles Portis grew up in Southern Arkansas, a region bordering Louisiana and Texas known as ArklaTex. He enlisted in the US Marine Corps at age eighteen and saw combat in Korea. After his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Arkansas. “You had to choose a major, so I put down journalism,” he said later. “I must have thought it would be fun and not very hard, something like barber college.” After graduating, Portis rose quickly as a journalist and in 1960 was hired by the venerable New York Herald Tribune. In New York he met and dated Nora Ephron, who remained a lifelong friend, praising Portis’s “spectacular and entirely eccentric style.” At the Herald Tribune, Portis wrote memorable dispatches from the front lines of the civil rights movement. In 1964, Portis quit journalism and returned to Arkansas to write novels. In 1966 he published Norwood, which tells the story of a wannabe country singer from Texas who travels to New York and falls in with a series of odd characters. The book became an immediate success and was later made into a 1970 film starring Glen Campbell. In 1968 Portis published his second novel, True Grit, an American classic that has twice been made into major films. The 1969 movie, starring John Wayne as US Marshall Rooster Cogburn, won the legendary actor his only Academy Award. The 2010 Coen Brothers film was nominated for ten Academy Awards and grossed over $250 million worldwide. After True Grit, Portis would publish only three more novels: The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos. Each is regarded as a brilliant tour de force, but none were bestsellers in the vein of True Grit. His sporadic output, combined with his aversion to publicity and his home base in Arkansas, led Portis to become mostly forgotten by the literary establishment. At one point in the 1990s, most of his work fell out of print. Then the reappraisals began. In an influential 1998 Esquire essay, critic Ron Rosenbaum extolled Portis as “Perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America.” After reading Rosenbaum’s essay, Tracy Carns, publications director for Overlook Press, set about acquiring rights to publish all of the novels. Thus began a wave of recognition for Portis’s work that has continued to grow, drawing in new generations of writers, critics, and readers. In 2020, after Portis’s death, accolades poured in from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Harper’s, The Paris Review and others, all publishing major retrospectives that championed his work. In 2023, Portis’s collected writings were released in the prestigious Library of America series, enshrining him as part of the American canon.