Charles portis library of america

Mattie hails from Yell County, Arkansas, and heads off by herself ostensibly to manage her father’s affairs-he had purchased some ponies at the time he was killed-but really to seek revenge for his death. The story-which virtually everyone must now by now, since it was made into not one, but two major Hollywood movies-concerns a girl named Mattie Ross whose father was murdered by a man who worked for him. True Grit is Portis’ most famous novel, but in some ways it’s his least characteristic. It’s an odd combination for an author whose usual narrator was a sarcastic cynical male.

She obviously wants to tell exactly what happened, as it happened, but she also has a kind of literary sensibility and tries to tell the story in a cultivated, literary way. One of the most wonderful things about True Grit is the voice of its narrator, whom we take to be the fourteen-old-girl who is going through this adventure, but who is actually much older, “a woman with brains and a frank tongue and one sleeve pinned up and an invalid mother to care for,” by her own description.