Charles Portis: Collected Works (LOA #369): Norwood / True Grit / The Dog of the South / Masters of Atlantis / Gringos / Stories Other Writings [Hardcover]

The ultimate Portis: for the first time in one collector's volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True Grit

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.