Quite simply, an American masterpiece. --Boston Globe

Charles Portis had a wonderful talent--original, quirky, exciting. --Larry McMurtry

Charles Portis has long been acclaimed as one of America's most enduring and incomparable literary voices, and his novels have left an indelible mark on the American canon. True Grit, his most famous novel, was first published in 1968, and has garnered critical acclaim as well as enthusiastic praise from countless passionate fans for more than 50 years.

True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just 14 when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Filled with an unwavering urge to avenge her father's blood, Mattie finds and, after some tenacious finagling, enlists one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available US Marshal, as her partner in pursuit, and they head off into Indian Territory after the killer.

True Grit is essential reading. Not just a classic Western, but an undeniable classic of American literature as eccentric, cool, funny, and unflinching as Mattie Ross herself. For fans of either the John Wayne classic or the Coen brothers' movie, it's a chance to relive the story of Mattie and Rooster and experience their story as it was originally told. For fans of taut, funny storytelling, it will be a joy to experience in its original form.

This edition includes an afterword by bestselling author Donna Tartt (The Secret History and The Goldfinch) and a reading group guide.

From Charles Portis, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of True Grit, The Dog of the South is a novel about a husband on a crazy road trip pursuing his runaway wife.

Hilarious . . . is, to me, a very American voice. --Bob Odenkirk, The Week

Ray Midge is waiting for his credit card bill to arrive. His wife, Norma, has run off with her ex-husband, taking Ray's cards, shotgun, and car. But from the receipts, Ray can track where they've gone.

He takes off after them, as does an irritatingly tenacious bail bondsman, both following the romantic couple's spending as far as Mexico. There Ray meets Dr. Reo Symes, the seemingly down-on-his-luck and rather eccentric owner of a beaten-up and broken-down bus, who needs a ride to Belize. The farther they drive, in a car held together by coat hangers and excesses of oil, the wilder their journey gets. But they're not going to give up easily.

[Charles Portis] understood, and conveyed, the grain of America, in ways that may prove valuable in future to historians trying to understand what was decent about us as a nation. --Donna Tartt, New York Times Book Review

One of the few laugh-out-loud novels I've read. --Conan O'Brien

Lamar Jimmerson is the leader of the Gnomon Society, the international fraternal order dedicated to preserving the arcane wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. Stationed in France in 1917, Jimmerson comes across a little book crammed with Atlantean puzzles, Egyptian riddles, and extended alchemical metaphors. It's the Codex Pappus: the sacred Gnomon text. Soon he is basking in the lore of lost Atlantis, convinced that his mission on Earth is to administer to and extend the ranks of the noble brotherhood.

Charles Portis wrote five novels, and this is his penultimate. Portis is often compared to Mark Twain because, like Twain, Portis focuses on and plays with the wide range of expression found in American speech. Every character in this novel has a unique way of expressing himself, and it's clear to the reader that Portis genuinely loves each and every one of these characters and creating for them a unique vernacular.

For fans of True Grit or other Charles Portis novels and for readers who have yet to discover his work, a trip with Portis and Lamar Jimmerson will be great fun and full of rewards.

A wonderful talent--original, quirky, exciting. --Larry McMurtry, author of The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment

I've loved his work all my life--The Dog of the South is a family favorite, as is Masters of Atlantis. . . . The books are so funny that they cry to be read aloud. --Donna Tartt, author of The Goldfinch and The Secret History, in the New York Times

Norwood, #1 New York Times bestselling author Charles Portis's first novel, displayed right out of the gate the wit, style, and singular voice that made him one of our great American writers.

A great American deadpan comedy. . . . Norwood, like a belt of whiskey, cleared my sinuses right up. --Slate

Out of the Neon Desert of Roller Dromes, chili parlors, the Grand Ole Opry, and girls who want to live in a trailer and play records all night comes ex-marine and troubadour Norwood Pratt. Sent on a mission to New York by Grady Fring, the Kredit King, Norwood has visions of speeding across the country in a late model car, seeing all the sights.

By the time he returns home to Ralph, Texas, Norwood has met his true love, Rita Lee, on a Trailway bus; befriended Edmund B. Ratner, the self-described world's smallest perfect man; and helped Joann, the chicken with a college education, realize her true potential in life.

As with all of Portis's fiction, the tone is cool, sympathetic, funny, and undeniably American.

Flawless . . . Norwood is a road novel as indispensable as On the Road itself. --Ed Park, Believer

Summer reading recommendation in THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature. --Ron Rosenbaum

Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Charles Portis's True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice. --Jonathan Lethem

No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does. --Donna Tartt

His fiction is the funniest I know. --Roy Blount, Jr.

Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Portis's deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit, the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far lower: an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy.

A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. no one should die without having read, The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.)

Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting.

Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the bravest dog in all Mexico.

A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis's skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in The Forgotten River; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection Combinations of Jacksons.

Jimmy Burns is an expatriate American living in Mexico who has an uncommonly astute eye for the absurd little details that comprise your average American. For a time, Jimmy spent his days unearthing pre-Colombian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing person situation--whatever it takes to remain the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers.

But when Jimmy's laid-back lifestyle is seriously imposed upon by a 90-pound stalker called Louise, a sudden wave of hippies (led by a murderous ex-con guru) in search of psychic happenings, and a group of archaeologists who are unearthing (illegally) Mayan tombs, his simple South-of-the-Border existence faces a clear and present danger.

Gringos is Portis's subtlest, funniest, and most valuable novel for its depth of inarguable wisdom. --Wells Tower, GQ

Collected here in Escape Velocity, edited by Jay Jennings, is Charles Portis's miscellany -- journalism, short fiction, memoir, and even the play Delray's New Moon, published for the first time in this volume. Portis covers topics as varied as the civil rights movement, road tripping in Baja, and Elvis's visits to his aging mother for publications such as the New York HeraldTribune and Saturday Evening Post.

Fans of Portis's droll Southern humor and quirky characters will be thrilled at this addition to his library, and those not yet familiar with his work will find a great introduction to him here. Also included are tributes by accomplished authors including Donna Tartt and Ron Rosenbaum.

True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just 14 when the coward Tom Chaney shoots down her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Determined to avenge the killing, Mattie enlists the help of Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available US Marshal, and pursues the killer into Indian Territory.

As Mattie outdickers and outmaneuvers the hard-bitten types in her path, her vitality and resourcefulness amuse, impress, and touch the reader. What happens to Mattie, to the gang of outlaws unfortunate enough to tangle with her, to Rooster and the swaggering Texas Ranger LeBoeuf rings with the dramatic rightness of legend.

An instant bestseller and critical success upon its first publication and the basis for two highly praised, award-winning films, True Grit is an American classic through and through.

Quite simply, an American masterpiece. --Boston Globe

True Grit is a selection of the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read Library.

For those who care about literature or simply love a good laugh (or both), Charles Portis has long been one of America's most admired novelists. His 1968 novel True Grit is fixed in the contemporary canon, and four more have been hailed as comic masterpieces. For the first time, his other writings--journalism, travel stories, short fiction, memoir, and even a play--were brought together in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, published in 2012 as his first new book in more than twenty years. This revised edition includes a new afterword by best-selling author Donna Tartt, who first published her remembrance in the New York Times following Portis's death in 2020.

All the familiar Portis elements are in this collection: picaresque adventures, deadpan humor, an expert eye for detail and keen ear for the spoken word, and encounters with oddball characters both real and imagined. The collection encompasses the breadth of his fifty-year writing career, from his gripping reportage of the civil rights movement for the New York Herald Tribune to a comic short story about the demise of journalism in the twenty-first century. His three-act play, Delray's New Moon, was performed onstage in 1996 and published in Escape Velocity for the first time.

Whether this is your first journey to the world of Portis or a long-awaited return to it, you'll agree with critic Ron Rosenbaum--whose essay appears here alongside tributes by other writers--that Portis will come to be regarded as the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain, a writer who captures the soul of America.