Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis [Paperback]

Robert Cochran’sHaunted Man’s Reportis a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novelTrue Gritand its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, and talent for injecting comedy into even the smallest turn of phrase. As a former Marine who served on the front lines of the Korean War and as a journalist who observed firsthand the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, Portis reported on atrocities that came to inform his fiction profoundly. His novels take aim at colonialism and notions of American exceptionalism, focusing on ordinary people, often vets, searching for safe havens in a fallen world.

Haunted Man’s Report, a deeply insightful literary exploration of Portis’s singular and underexamined oeuvre, celebrates this novelist’s great achievement and is certain to prove a valuable guide for readers new to Portis as well as aficionados.“What are we Portis fans to do, after re-reading the Little Rock laureate’s five novels to pieces? Cochran’s smart, engaging critical biography makes a terrific companion volume toEscape Velocity. Even grizzled Portisheads will find fresh glimmers of insight.”
—Ed Park, author ofSame Bed Different Dreams“Cochran’s volume gathers a great deal of scrupulous research, and even some portion of psycho-biographical speculation, into a persuasive close reading of five novels, plus journalism, a short story, and Portis’s single stage play. Cochran brings to light both the sidelong historical ruminations and the sorrowful depths of feeling that admirers have always sensed movinlƒ,