People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. Here is how the book begins in my copy (an early 2000s paperback published by Overlook Press):

As Ed Park once put it, Mattie’s “steadfast, unsentimental voice-Portis’s sublime ventriloquism-maintains such purity of purpose that the prose seems engraved rather than merely writ.”Īnd Portis has Mattie’s voice and character nailed from the very first lines. There may be action and adventure between these pages, but Mattie Ross’s voice is what makes this novel unforgettable. If you haven’t read the novel, I will tell you that-even for someone who doesn’t typically go in for Westerns-it is wonderful, due in large part to its narrator, Mattie Ross. It had entered into the murky realm of cult literary classic when it was adapted to film for a second time (with Jeff Bridges!) in 2010, and now I’d rate it as Pretty Famous. It was reprinted in book form by Simon & Schuster later that year, adapted into a movie (with John Wayne!) the year after, and became a bestseller.

Fifty years ago today, the first installment of Charles Portis’s True Grit was published in the Saturday Evening Post.

True grit book