![]() ![]() ![]() 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. Here is how the book begins in my copy (an early 2000s paperback published by Overlook Press): As Ed Park once put it, Mattie’s “steadfast, unsentimental voice-Portis’s sublime ventriloquism-maintains such purity of purpose that the prose seems engraved rather than merely writ.”Īnd Portis has Mattie’s voice and character nailed from the very first lines. ![]() There may be action and adventure between these pages, but Mattie Ross’s voice is what makes this novel unforgettable. If you haven’t read the novel, I will tell you that-even for someone who doesn’t typically go in for Westerns-it is wonderful, due in large part to its narrator, Mattie Ross. It had entered into the murky realm of cult literary classic when it was adapted to film for a second time (with Jeff Bridges!) in 2010, and now I’d rate it as Pretty Famous. It was reprinted in book form by Simon & Schuster later that year, adapted into a movie (with John Wayne!) the year after, and became a bestseller. Fifty years ago today, the first installment of Charles Portis’s True Grit was published in the Saturday Evening Post. ![]()
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