Charles Portis
Charles McColl Portis was an influential American author renowned for his unique contributions to literature, particularly in the realm of the short novel. Born in 1933 in Arkansas, Portis pursued a career in journalism before shifting his focus to fiction writing, leading to the publication of several acclaimed novels. His most famous work, "True Grit," features a determined young protagonist and showcases themes of resilience and personal quests against various challenges. Portis's writing style is characterized by humor and a satirical perspective on American culture, as seen in novels such as "The Dog of the South" and "Gringos," which explore the quirks of human nature and society.
His literary career gained renewed attention with adaptations of "True Grit" into films in 1969 and again in 2010, the latter featuring an all-star cast and achieving significant box office success. Despite a long hiatus from publishing new novels, Portis's earlier works continue to resonate with readers, culminating in the 2012 anthology "Escape Velocity," which compiles his travel stories and journalism, including coverage of the civil rights movement. Throughout his life, Portis maintained a low profile, often shying away from media attention and interviews, which adds to the mystique of his literary legacy.
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Charles Portis
Author
- Born: December 28, 1933
- Birthplace: El Dorado, Arkansas
- Died: February 17, 2020
American novelist
Biography
Charles McColl Portis is a master of the short novel and of the independent life. Indeed, it was because he asserted his independence when he abandoned a promising journalistic career to return to his home state and follow his own inclinations that he was able to turn to writing fiction. His parents were Samuel Palmer Portis, a lawyer’s son who had moved from Alabama to become a school superintendent in Arkansas, and Alice (Waddell) Portis, an Arkansas native, the daughter of a Methodist clergyman, and a poet. Charles Portis grew up in the southern Arkansas towns of El Dorado, Mount Holly, and Hamburg. Between 1952 and 1955 he served in Korea as a rifleman and Browning automatic rifleman in the US Marine Corps, finding himself on a fortified hill called Outpost Ginger when the white truce flares were fired on July 27, 1953. By the time of his discharge he had attained the rank of sergeant. In the summer of 1955 he enrolled at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, graduating three years later as a journalism major. After working as a reporter for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis he returned to Arkansas to work for the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock. This return to his home state prefigured both his later return to Arkansas from London and the penchant of his fictional characters to return home.
In 1960 he obtained a position as general reporter for the Herald Tribune in New York, and during 1962 and 1963 he covered extensively the civil rights turmoil in Albany, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and Jackson, Mississippi. In November 1963, he won an assignment to London as bureau chief for the Herald Tribune. He resigned from that job after only one year, “to return home,” as he says, “on an apple-green ship called the Mauretania, and try my hand at writing fiction.”
His first attempt was Norwood, a critical and commercial success when it appeared in 1966. This novel set the pattern for three of the four novels that followed: An intelligent but fallible young person sets out with unflagging determination to right a wrong or complete a personal mission, meets challenging obstacles with optimism and dogged persistence, aids persons met along the way, and learns enough from experience to return home or to a homelike base. In Norwood the title character, having just left the Marines, travels from Ralph, Texas, to New York City to collect the seventy dollars a buddy owes him. He is beset by a con man and struggles against various vicissitudes. He helps Rita Lee, whom he eventually wishes to marry; Edmund B. Ratner, the world’s smallest perfect fat man; and Joann the Wonder Hen. With his successes outnumbering his failures, he returns home to Ralph, Texas.
The wanderer in True Grit is fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, who enlists the aid of deputy US marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn and Texas Ranger sergeant LaBoeuf in bringing to justice her father’s murderer. Each of her assistants benefits from her quixotic nature. She succeeds in her mission at the cost of an arm and, still fostering an unadmitted love for the much older Cogburn, returns home to a celibate and financially successful life.
In Portis’s next 1979 novel, “The Dog of the South” is the name of a broken-down bus, which actually figures only slightly in the action. The bus has been abandoned by a nonpracticing physician, Reo Symes, who is the recipient of Ray Midge’s beneficence during Ray’s pursuit of his wife and his blue Torino. Ray brings his wife home to Arkansas from a plantation in British Honduras, only to have her desert him again. The novel nudges the reader to ponder its learned epigraph about animal restlessness (from Sir Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus, 1658) and the relationship of its title, which refers to the immobile bus, to Sirius, the star in the southern constellation of Canis Major.
With Masters of Atlantis (1985) Portis departs from the quixotic-quest pattern of the previous novels. This work, a broad satire on occultism, has wacky but irresistibly likable characters—Lamar Jimmerson, Sir Sydney Hen, and Austin Popper—who represent, respectively, the passive, transitive, and active modes of optative delusion in their propagation of the pseudoscience and quasi religion of gnomonism. Jimmerson, the true believer, and Popper, the fanatic opportunist, are reflective of a society whose essentially sensible people have lost sight of their ethical lodestar.
Gringos (1991), which mingles humor with straight-faced belief in extraterrestrialism, deepens the dimensions of Portis’s gentle satire. The titular characters include hippies, some of them vicious; archaeologists who are professional and amateur students of Mayan culture; workers; and tourists. One of them, Jimmy Burns, combines his amateur archaeological research with work trucking goods for locals and tourists. On his quest for a missing amateur archaeologist named Rudy he incidentally saves two children from captivity by a mad hippie cult leader. These characters belong to Portis’s gallery of authentic losers and limited winners, who represent a special segment of American culture.
Though Portis did not publish any new novels over the next two decades and he was mentioned in the media usually only in the context of his absence or the ongoing debate about his work being underrated, he gained renewed attention when his novel True Grit was adapted into a film for the second time in 2010; the first film version had been released in 1969. The twenty-first century iteration, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, involves an all-star cast that includes Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin. Reaching number one at the box office, the film brought renewed interest to Portis's work, especially True Grit, which became a best seller once more.
In 2012, editor Jay Jennings put together a collection of Portis's travel stories, short fiction, and newspaper and magazine articles in a book titled Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. This anthology highlights Portis's earlier, significant coverage of the civil rights movement for the Herald Tribune and also includes a new three-act play. As of 2016, Portis had not written another original novel and continued to remain private and refrain from conducting interviews.
Bibliography
Idol, John L., Jr. “Charles Portis.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South. Ed. Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport: Greenwood, 1993. Print.
Jennings, Jay. "Charles Portis, a Journalist with True Grit." Daily Beast. Daily Beast, 25 Sept. 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.
Portis, Charles. Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. Ed. Jay Jennings. Little Rock: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2012. Print.
Rosenbaum, Ron. “Our Least-Known Great Novelist.” Esquire January 1998: 30–32. Print.
Shuman, R. Baird. “Portis’ True Grit: An Adventure or Entwicklungsroman?” English Journal 59 (1970): 367–70. Print.