What do you think?
Rate this book
True Grit
True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash money. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory.
True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true cult status, this is an American classic through and through.
True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true cult status, this is an American classic through and through.
190 pages, Paperback
First published May 21, 1968
About the author
Charles Portis
11 books679 followersCharles McColl Portis was an American author best known for his novels Norwood (1966) and the classic Western True Grit (1968), both adapted as films. The latter also inspired a film sequel and a made-for-TV movie sequel. A newer film adaptation of True Grit was released in 2010.
Portis served in the Marine Corps during the Korean war and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He graduated with a degree in journalism in 1958.
His journalistic career included work at the Arkansas Gazette before he moved to New York to work for The New York Herald Tribune. After serving as the London bureau chief for the The New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism in 1964 and returned to Arkansas to write novels.
Portis served in the Marine Corps during the Korean war and attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He graduated with a degree in journalism in 1958.
His journalistic career included work at the Arkansas Gazette before he moved to New York to work for The New York Herald Tribune. After serving as the London bureau chief for the The New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism in 1964 and returned to Arkansas to write novels.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 7,517 reviews
February 19, 2020
Revived review
R.I.P. Charles Portis 1933-2020
creator of Mattie Ross, who will live forever
*******
Finding a novel which you can recommend to everybody is really not easy. Look at these totally five-star novels :
Lolita? nah, it’s about a paedophile
Ulysses? absolutely not, too hard, and no plot
Moby Dick? you kidding? recommend this and lose your friends!
A Clockwork Orange? – it’s not even in English!
Trainspotting? – see Clockwork Orange
Memoirs of Hadrian? See Ulysses, only also, it’s Roman
Blindness? it’s horrible!
But here is True Grit, which I recommend to all goodreaders. (Are there any badreaders? Is there a Badreads.com? What do they do?)
True Grit is as salty as a bag of salt salted by extra-salty salt. It’s deadpan and hilarious. It was almost buried by one dreadful movie version, the first one, then rescued by a wonderful version. I don’t usually rush to read the bookofthemovie but the voice of 14 year old Mattie Ross whose story this is is brilliant :
Rooster talked all night. I would doze off and wake up and he would still be talking. I did not give credence to everything he said. He said he knew a woman in Sedelia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child. He said it puzzled the doctors.
Mattie’s lack of any sense of humour along with any reasonable sense of self-preservation makes a violent story into pure comedy. The collision of the great Falstaff-as-Terminator character of Rooster Cogburn and the innocent-but-uncanny Mattie is a kind of love story. Love has many faces. Rooster is not any kind of role model for a young person. The whole thing reminds me of the ballad “On the Trail of the Buffalo”, especially this verse
Well the working season ended, but the drover would not pay
He said “You went and drunk too much, you’re all in debt to me”
But the cowboys never did hear of such a thing as the bankrupt law
So we left that drover’s bones to bleach on the hills of the buffalo
It took me several days to read this short novel because of one thing and another, but also because after a few pages I would just like to stop and savour it. It’s a fast read but I was slowing down all the time.
“Who is the best marshal they have?'
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'
I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”
R.I.P. Charles Portis 1933-2020
creator of Mattie Ross, who will live forever
*******
Finding a novel which you can recommend to everybody is really not easy. Look at these totally five-star novels :
Lolita? nah, it’s about a paedophile
Ulysses? absolutely not, too hard, and no plot
Moby Dick? you kidding? recommend this and lose your friends!
A Clockwork Orange? – it’s not even in English!
Trainspotting? – see Clockwork Orange
Memoirs of Hadrian? See Ulysses, only also, it’s Roman
Blindness? it’s horrible!
But here is True Grit, which I recommend to all goodreaders. (Are there any badreaders? Is there a Badreads.com? What do they do?)
True Grit is as salty as a bag of salt salted by extra-salty salt. It’s deadpan and hilarious. It was almost buried by one dreadful movie version, the first one, then rescued by a wonderful version. I don’t usually rush to read the bookofthemovie but the voice of 14 year old Mattie Ross whose story this is is brilliant :
Rooster talked all night. I would doze off and wake up and he would still be talking. I did not give credence to everything he said. He said he knew a woman in Sedelia, Missouri, who had stepped on a needle as a girl and nine years later the needle worked out of the thigh of her third child. He said it puzzled the doctors.
Mattie’s lack of any sense of humour along with any reasonable sense of self-preservation makes a violent story into pure comedy. The collision of the great Falstaff-as-Terminator character of Rooster Cogburn and the innocent-but-uncanny Mattie is a kind of love story. Love has many faces. Rooster is not any kind of role model for a young person. The whole thing reminds me of the ballad “On the Trail of the Buffalo”, especially this verse
Well the working season ended, but the drover would not pay
He said “You went and drunk too much, you’re all in debt to me”
But the cowboys never did hear of such a thing as the bankrupt law
So we left that drover’s bones to bleach on the hills of the buffalo
It took me several days to read this short novel because of one thing and another, but also because after a few pages I would just like to stop and savour it. It’s a fast read but I was slowing down all the time.
“Who is the best marshal they have?'
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'
I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”
June 4, 2019
I loved it.
Mattie Ross is one of the great American children characters along with Huckleberry Finn and Scout Finch. Portis’ protagonist and narrator looks back from the early 1900s to her childhood in the 1870s, not long after the end of the Civil War, when she as a 14 year old girl went out into the Indian nation to find her father’s killer.
Reminiscent of Mark Twain (and also Barbara Kingsolver’s narration in The Poisonwood Bible) the lyric quality of Charles Portis’s prose is a treasure. Portis has captured an earlier language and a world more than a hundred years gone comes alive again in the pages held before us.
“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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”
Mattie Ross shows a pluck not often seen in today’s reality nor in our modern literature. Portis’ character was lifted from history as seamlessly and as accurately as her sharpened pencil bookkeeping and the quality of her vouchers for payment.
This teenage girl was every bit the match for hardened men of her day and her narration, looking back from a long life, conjured images of a tough older women, wizened to her world yet acknowledging from a distance of time the stuff of her earlier self. Portis has Mattie speak some gems:
“As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”
“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
“But I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?”
The films, both of them – Henry Hathaway’s 1969 award winning film starring John Wayne and the Coen brothers film starring Jeff Bridges – are two of my all time favorite movies. While Portis’ novel is told from the spunky perspective of Mattie Ross (and both films follow her as the central protagonist) in both the character of Deputy Marshall Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn is the man who steals the show.
“Who is the best marshal they have?'
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'
I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”
I have loved the films for years but this was my first time reading and the first thing that came to me (besides both films loving proximity to the text) is that this is a funny book. I smiled frequently during many of Mattie’s descriptions of events and laughed out loud several times. Though I would not call this a comedy, it is a well rounded and brilliant masterpiece that contains comic elements.
“She said, 'Goodbye, Reuben, a love for decency does not abide in you.' There is your divorced woman talking about decency. I told her, I said, 'Goodbye, Nola, I hope that little nail selling bastard will make you happy this time.”
An American classic, but one that has a universal appeal, Portis’ has created a masterpiece.
Mattie Ross is one of the great American children characters along with Huckleberry Finn and Scout Finch. Portis’ protagonist and narrator looks back from the early 1900s to her childhood in the 1870s, not long after the end of the Civil War, when she as a 14 year old girl went out into the Indian nation to find her father’s killer.
Reminiscent of Mark Twain (and also Barbara Kingsolver’s narration in The Poisonwood Bible) the lyric quality of Charles Portis’s prose is a treasure. Portis has captured an earlier language and a world more than a hundred years gone comes alive again in the pages held before us.
“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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”
Mattie Ross shows a pluck not often seen in today’s reality nor in our modern literature. Portis’ character was lifted from history as seamlessly and as accurately as her sharpened pencil bookkeeping and the quality of her vouchers for payment.
This teenage girl was every bit the match for hardened men of her day and her narration, looking back from a long life, conjured images of a tough older women, wizened to her world yet acknowledging from a distance of time the stuff of her earlier self. Portis has Mattie speak some gems:
“As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”
“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
“But I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?”
The films, both of them – Henry Hathaway’s 1969 award winning film starring John Wayne and the Coen brothers film starring Jeff Bridges – are two of my all time favorite movies. While Portis’ novel is told from the spunky perspective of Mattie Ross (and both films follow her as the central protagonist) in both the character of Deputy Marshall Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn is the man who steals the show.
“Who is the best marshal they have?'
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'
I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”
I have loved the films for years but this was my first time reading and the first thing that came to me (besides both films loving proximity to the text) is that this is a funny book. I smiled frequently during many of Mattie’s descriptions of events and laughed out loud several times. Though I would not call this a comedy, it is a well rounded and brilliant masterpiece that contains comic elements.
“She said, 'Goodbye, Reuben, a love for decency does not abide in you.' There is your divorced woman talking about decency. I told her, I said, 'Goodbye, Nola, I hope that little nail selling bastard will make you happy this time.”
An American classic, but one that has a universal appeal, Portis’ has created a masterpiece.
March 23, 2024
“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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band…”
- Charles Portis, True Grit: A Novel
There is nothing unfamiliar about the setup to Charles Portis’s True Grit. It is a revenge story, and a simple one. As succinctly set forth in the opening paragraph – quoted above – it is narrated in the first-person by Mattie Ross, whose father is killed by an itinerant worker named Tom Chaney.
Mattie goes to Fort Smith to settle her father’s affairs, and to hire a U.S. Marshal to follow Chaney into the Indian Territory. Among the many marshals of Judge Isaac Parker’s court, Mattie chooses Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, an overweight, one-eyed man in his forties, picked solely for his meanness, and the fact that he has “true grit.”
Learning that Chaney has fallen in with Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang of outlaws, Mattie and Rooster – along with a vain and pompous Texas Ranger called La Boeuf – set out to bring Chaney to justice, or justice to Chaney.
Literary history brims with vengeance. Some tales – such as The Count of Monte Cristo – can be rather elaborate, even complicated. Not True Grit. This book is resolutely streamlined, unfolding linearly and episodically.
What sets True Grit apart – what allows it to rise to the top of those titles concerned with balancing the scales – is the idiom in which it is written. This is a novel with a voice, one that is authentic without feeling forced; that is deadpan, while packing an emotional punch; that is funny without resorting solely to slapstick; and that is profound without straining for meaning.
It is a book in which every word is rightly chosen, where every sentence lands square. It is a book – in other words – that perfectly executes what it sets out to do.
***
Everything starts with Mattie Ross.
The marvel of Portis’s achievement is not merely that he inhabits the mind of a young girl in the late 19th century. It’s that he is able to inhabit the mind of a very particular old woman in the early 20th century, looking back at her experiences as a young girl in the late 19th century.
To read True Grit is to believe Mattie’s account to be a contemporaneous document. Though decidedly not historical fiction – despite the presence of real-life personages, such as Judge Parker – there is a natural verisimilitude that gives this a ring of truth. Mattie has an easy grasp of contemporary manners, customs, technology, weaponry, and even negotiable instruments. True Grit could almost have been a series of colorful diary entries.
As a protagonist, Portis’s Mattie is an absolute hoot, a sharp tongued minor force of nature. This is critical, because we spend every single page with her.
True Grit is not a character study or a psychological excavation. While Mattie is determined to avenge her father’s death, her motivation is not plumbed at length. For instance, there is never a maudlin scene in which she dwells at length upon the relationship sundered by Tom Chaney.
Driven not by emotion, Mattie views the world through a stark prism that is heavily informed by her Presbyterianism. She believes in rules, in ethics, and in laws. As Chaney broke the law, he must be punished. In a long-running gag that also serves as a character tell, Mattie refers often to J. Noble Daggett, her family’s attorney, sometimes appealing to his authority, while elsewhere offering his services to the corrupt men she meets.
Early in the novel, Mattie watches three men hanged in Fort Smith. The grotesqueness of the executions clearly trouble her, yet she accepts it as the inevitable consequences of the choices they made: “You must pay for everything in this world one way or another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God.”
***
Like Mattie, her companions are memorable.
Rooster is a fascinating figure, a cold-hearted killer with a reprehensible past who comes to us in the guise of a drunken old fat man bordering on the buffoonish.
When Mattie first meets him, it is at a trial in which Rooster is being cross-examined as to his reputation for failing to bring his quarry back alive. Later, in talking with Mattie, we will learn that Rooster rode with William Quantrill during the Civil War, participating in the infamous sack of Lawrence, Kansas. In keeping with Mattie’s just-the-facts presentation – “Here is what happened” is an oft-repeated phrase – we are left on our own to decide what to make of Cogburn, and his checkered background.
The third member of the triumvirate, La Boeuf, is not as fully-realized as Mattie and Rooster, but is nonetheless unforgettable. He exists mainly as a foil for Rooster, his vanity, pride, and Texan-ness proving an excellent counterpoint to the dissolute U.S. Marshal. Still, by the end, La Boeuf has proven that he belongs, while also demonstrating the fundamental soundness of character triangles in drama.
***
True Grit is not what I would classify as an epic. Unlike Alan LeMay’s The Searchers – another American West-set revenger – it does not unfold over the course of years, but within a much more limited span. Instead of a long, drawn-out chase, events occur rather quickly once Mattie, Rooster, and La Boeuf get out of Fort Smith.
Keeping with Mattie’s nature, she focuses on the big moments, so that True Grit coheres around a handful of major set pieces, each one delivered with precision. There are gunfights, obviously, and Mattie’s infamous encounter with a pit in the mountains. But there are also quirkier scenes, including a hilariously drawn-out sequence in which Mattie negotiates for the resale of a string of ponies purchased by her late father.
***
True Grit has been turned into two well-received films, and a sequel. The reason, of course, is that Portis’s classic is inherently cinematic. The three leads play off each other beautifully, the supporting actors (including the benighted, pathetic Tom Chaney) are colorful, the plot mechanics are seamless, and the dialogue sings.
Putting True Grit on the screen is a no-brainer. It is also – regardless of these films’ qualities – unnecessary, because the book comes alive in your mind as you read it.
***
The American West has had an outsized effect on American identity, especially with regard to notions of individuality, personal freedoms, and the role of government. In reality, the “winning” of the West was an exceedingly rough and brutal period marked by violence, betrayal, and greed. The moral ambiguities of this conquest are difficult to rationalize. Seemingly in response, writers and filmmakers have coated “the Old West” in a lacquer of myth and legend.
In the approximately 130 years since the United States Census Bureau announced the closing of the American frontier, popular culture has been in a dialogue with itself over what it meant to secure the continent. The original penny westerns told of a grand adventure. The simple, dichotomous westerns of the 1940s and 1950s gave us good guys and bad guys, though often with a head-scratching definition of what constituted good and bad. Post-Vietnam we got the ultra-violent revisionist western. Today, we are seeing revisions to the revisionists.
The funny thing about True Grit is that it does not really seem part of this conversation at all. Unlike Blood Meridian or Lonesome Dove, Portis makes no effort to comment on the dispossession of the Indian tribes, the governmental giveaways to corrupt corporations, or the land wars between farmers and ranchers. Mattie is not interested in these things. For her, it is all personal.
But this narrowness of scope is a feature, not a bug. Portis is content to deliver a damn good yarn. Though this has arguably kept True Grit from being considered a contender for the elusive crown of the “Great American Novel,” it is more than enough.
- Charles Portis, True Grit: A Novel
There is nothing unfamiliar about the setup to Charles Portis’s True Grit. It is a revenge story, and a simple one. As succinctly set forth in the opening paragraph – quoted above – it is narrated in the first-person by Mattie Ross, whose father is killed by an itinerant worker named Tom Chaney.
Mattie goes to Fort Smith to settle her father’s affairs, and to hire a U.S. Marshal to follow Chaney into the Indian Territory. Among the many marshals of Judge Isaac Parker’s court, Mattie chooses Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, an overweight, one-eyed man in his forties, picked solely for his meanness, and the fact that he has “true grit.”
Learning that Chaney has fallen in with Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang of outlaws, Mattie and Rooster – along with a vain and pompous Texas Ranger called La Boeuf – set out to bring Chaney to justice, or justice to Chaney.
Literary history brims with vengeance. Some tales – such as The Count of Monte Cristo – can be rather elaborate, even complicated. Not True Grit. This book is resolutely streamlined, unfolding linearly and episodically.
What sets True Grit apart – what allows it to rise to the top of those titles concerned with balancing the scales – is the idiom in which it is written. This is a novel with a voice, one that is authentic without feeling forced; that is deadpan, while packing an emotional punch; that is funny without resorting solely to slapstick; and that is profound without straining for meaning.
It is a book in which every word is rightly chosen, where every sentence lands square. It is a book – in other words – that perfectly executes what it sets out to do.
***
Everything starts with Mattie Ross.
The marvel of Portis’s achievement is not merely that he inhabits the mind of a young girl in the late 19th century. It’s that he is able to inhabit the mind of a very particular old woman in the early 20th century, looking back at her experiences as a young girl in the late 19th century.
To read True Grit is to believe Mattie’s account to be a contemporaneous document. Though decidedly not historical fiction – despite the presence of real-life personages, such as Judge Parker – there is a natural verisimilitude that gives this a ring of truth. Mattie has an easy grasp of contemporary manners, customs, technology, weaponry, and even negotiable instruments. True Grit could almost have been a series of colorful diary entries.
As a protagonist, Portis’s Mattie is an absolute hoot, a sharp tongued minor force of nature. This is critical, because we spend every single page with her.
True Grit is not a character study or a psychological excavation. While Mattie is determined to avenge her father’s death, her motivation is not plumbed at length. For instance, there is never a maudlin scene in which she dwells at length upon the relationship sundered by Tom Chaney.
Driven not by emotion, Mattie views the world through a stark prism that is heavily informed by her Presbyterianism. She believes in rules, in ethics, and in laws. As Chaney broke the law, he must be punished. In a long-running gag that also serves as a character tell, Mattie refers often to J. Noble Daggett, her family’s attorney, sometimes appealing to his authority, while elsewhere offering his services to the corrupt men she meets.
Early in the novel, Mattie watches three men hanged in Fort Smith. The grotesqueness of the executions clearly trouble her, yet she accepts it as the inevitable consequences of the choices they made: “You must pay for everything in this world one way or another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God.”
***
Like Mattie, her companions are memorable.
Rooster is a fascinating figure, a cold-hearted killer with a reprehensible past who comes to us in the guise of a drunken old fat man bordering on the buffoonish.
When Mattie first meets him, it is at a trial in which Rooster is being cross-examined as to his reputation for failing to bring his quarry back alive. Later, in talking with Mattie, we will learn that Rooster rode with William Quantrill during the Civil War, participating in the infamous sack of Lawrence, Kansas. In keeping with Mattie’s just-the-facts presentation – “Here is what happened” is an oft-repeated phrase – we are left on our own to decide what to make of Cogburn, and his checkered background.
The third member of the triumvirate, La Boeuf, is not as fully-realized as Mattie and Rooster, but is nonetheless unforgettable. He exists mainly as a foil for Rooster, his vanity, pride, and Texan-ness proving an excellent counterpoint to the dissolute U.S. Marshal. Still, by the end, La Boeuf has proven that he belongs, while also demonstrating the fundamental soundness of character triangles in drama.
***
True Grit is not what I would classify as an epic. Unlike Alan LeMay’s The Searchers – another American West-set revenger – it does not unfold over the course of years, but within a much more limited span. Instead of a long, drawn-out chase, events occur rather quickly once Mattie, Rooster, and La Boeuf get out of Fort Smith.
Keeping with Mattie’s nature, she focuses on the big moments, so that True Grit coheres around a handful of major set pieces, each one delivered with precision. There are gunfights, obviously, and Mattie’s infamous encounter with a pit in the mountains. But there are also quirkier scenes, including a hilariously drawn-out sequence in which Mattie negotiates for the resale of a string of ponies purchased by her late father.
***
True Grit has been turned into two well-received films, and a sequel. The reason, of course, is that Portis’s classic is inherently cinematic. The three leads play off each other beautifully, the supporting actors (including the benighted, pathetic Tom Chaney) are colorful, the plot mechanics are seamless, and the dialogue sings.
Putting True Grit on the screen is a no-brainer. It is also – regardless of these films’ qualities – unnecessary, because the book comes alive in your mind as you read it.
***
The American West has had an outsized effect on American identity, especially with regard to notions of individuality, personal freedoms, and the role of government. In reality, the “winning” of the West was an exceedingly rough and brutal period marked by violence, betrayal, and greed. The moral ambiguities of this conquest are difficult to rationalize. Seemingly in response, writers and filmmakers have coated “the Old West” in a lacquer of myth and legend.
In the approximately 130 years since the United States Census Bureau announced the closing of the American frontier, popular culture has been in a dialogue with itself over what it meant to secure the continent. The original penny westerns told of a grand adventure. The simple, dichotomous westerns of the 1940s and 1950s gave us good guys and bad guys, though often with a head-scratching definition of what constituted good and bad. Post-Vietnam we got the ultra-violent revisionist western. Today, we are seeing revisions to the revisionists.
The funny thing about True Grit is that it does not really seem part of this conversation at all. Unlike Blood Meridian or Lonesome Dove, Portis makes no effort to comment on the dispossession of the Indian tribes, the governmental giveaways to corrupt corporations, or the land wars between farmers and ranchers. Mattie is not interested in these things. For her, it is all personal.
But this narrowness of scope is a feature, not a bug. Portis is content to deliver a damn good yarn. Though this has arguably kept True Grit from being considered a contender for the elusive crown of the “Great American Novel,” it is more than enough.
August 20, 2020
Reading Road Trip 2020
Current location: Arkansas
There are readers who have a particular penchant for stories set in Paris after the French Revolution, and there are readers who don't ever want to leave London, just following WWII, but for me, my sweet spot has always been set in America, right at the end of the Civil War.
It was a tender and tentative time, here in the U.S. We had just ripped our country asunder, finally abolished slavery, and assassinated the noblest leader this nation has ever known.
We then experienced a quiet poverty, a great disorientation, and an abundant wound licking, as all people, everywhere, do, following a war.
So much less was known then about trauma and healing, and so, given what we know about the great American spirit and concepts like manifest destiny, so much of our suffering and our healing continued to play out by pressing on into the Big Sky country of the American West.
It was a big setting for a diminished people.
Onto this small stage have stepped several memorable characters, but I met a new one this week: Mattie Ross, the oldest child of Frank Ross:
Frank Ross was the gentlest, most honorable man who ever lived. He had a common-school education. He was a Cumberland Presbyterian and a Mason. . . He was hurt in the terrible fight at Chickamauga up in the state of Tennessee and came near to dying on the way home from want of proper care.
Frank Ross didn't die in the war, and his wife and children were able to celebrate the return of their beloved father and husband. . . only to have him killed promptly by a man named Tom Chaney, a drifter whom the kindhearted Frank Ross had taken in as a ranch hand.
Tom Chaney rode his gray horse that was better suited to a middlebuster than carrying a rider. He had no hand gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you.
When Tom Chaney kills beloved Frank Ross in front of several eyewitnesses and then flees from the law, Mattie Ross is discouraged by the underwhelmed and understaffed local authorities. She decides to take matters into her own hands.
What follows is the most fascinating story of a stoic young woman and her determination to see her father's killer apprehended. And, in doing so, she becomes sandwiched in between an erratic U.S. Marshal known as “Rooster” and a dandy of a Texas rancher known as “LaBoeuf,” two men she has negotiated with to satisfy her desire for justice.
Mattie Ross is a slip of a girl, a young woman, who, at 14-years-old, would be more likely, given the time period, to be focused on romance than revenge.
Hardly.
Mattie does the opposite of most young women at every turn, and Charles Portis was a GENIUS for creating her.
I am not kidding when I tell you that this read had garnered five stars from me, from its very first paragraph.
I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I will go on, now, to read everything Charles Portis has ever written.
The title of this story, True Grit, comes from this line that Mattie speaks to Rooster: “They tell me you are a man with true grit.”
Turns out, Mattie possesses just as much grit as either of the men.
Damn.
A new favorite.
Current location: Arkansas
There are readers who have a particular penchant for stories set in Paris after the French Revolution, and there are readers who don't ever want to leave London, just following WWII, but for me, my sweet spot has always been set in America, right at the end of the Civil War.
It was a tender and tentative time, here in the U.S. We had just ripped our country asunder, finally abolished slavery, and assassinated the noblest leader this nation has ever known.
We then experienced a quiet poverty, a great disorientation, and an abundant wound licking, as all people, everywhere, do, following a war.
So much less was known then about trauma and healing, and so, given what we know about the great American spirit and concepts like manifest destiny, so much of our suffering and our healing continued to play out by pressing on into the Big Sky country of the American West.
It was a big setting for a diminished people.
Onto this small stage have stepped several memorable characters, but I met a new one this week: Mattie Ross, the oldest child of Frank Ross:
Frank Ross was the gentlest, most honorable man who ever lived. He had a common-school education. He was a Cumberland Presbyterian and a Mason. . . He was hurt in the terrible fight at Chickamauga up in the state of Tennessee and came near to dying on the way home from want of proper care.
Frank Ross didn't die in the war, and his wife and children were able to celebrate the return of their beloved father and husband. . . only to have him killed promptly by a man named Tom Chaney, a drifter whom the kindhearted Frank Ross had taken in as a ranch hand.
Tom Chaney rode his gray horse that was better suited to a middlebuster than carrying a rider. He had no hand gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line. There is trash for you.
When Tom Chaney kills beloved Frank Ross in front of several eyewitnesses and then flees from the law, Mattie Ross is discouraged by the underwhelmed and understaffed local authorities. She decides to take matters into her own hands.
What follows is the most fascinating story of a stoic young woman and her determination to see her father's killer apprehended. And, in doing so, she becomes sandwiched in between an erratic U.S. Marshal known as “Rooster” and a dandy of a Texas rancher known as “LaBoeuf,” two men she has negotiated with to satisfy her desire for justice.
Mattie Ross is a slip of a girl, a young woman, who, at 14-years-old, would be more likely, given the time period, to be focused on romance than revenge.
Hardly.
Mattie does the opposite of most young women at every turn, and Charles Portis was a GENIUS for creating her.
I am not kidding when I tell you that this read had garnered five stars from me, from its very first paragraph.
I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I will go on, now, to read everything Charles Portis has ever written.
The title of this story, True Grit, comes from this line that Mattie speaks to Rooster: “They tell me you are a man with true grit.”
Turns out, Mattie possesses just as much grit as either of the men.
Damn.
A new favorite.
April 17, 2019
this book is wonderful in a lot of ways. the last fifty or so pages alone are intense and scary and my mouth did that thing where it just falls open and makes me look totally doofy but i couldn't care because i was frantically reading to find out what would happen. that is some seriously good writing.
and if i had read this when i was younger and it had been part of my life for a long time, or even if i had read it before winter's bone, it would probably have attained the five stars.
but. narratorial voice.
so the story is told from the perspective of an elderly mattie, retelling the events of What Happened to her in year 14, recollected in tranquility and all that, but this ain't no transcendentalist. she is this puritanical spinster barking crusty old testament ideals of justice into the narrative which would be great if it were offset in alternating chapters maybe, but is jarring when it slips into the thoughts of a young girl, even a young girl in which we can see the baby-roots of this prissy judgmental worldview.
and maybe a lot of people find that awesome, but me, this reader, it was like when you are just drifting off to sleep pleasantly and then you hear this mosquito, and you are like - goddammit- that thing again, and you could still drift off, but your sleep would be tainted by knowing you were probably going to wake up with a swollen itchy face. (this probably doesn't make any sense - i have a zillion things happening in my head right now so i am only giving this review 70% attention)
i can't help it, my heart belongs to ree. and i know how unfair it is to compare on book to another, but there is no way to avoid it. if i were to invite both of them for tea, ree probably wouldn't come - she would go off and shoot a squirrel and watch me with suspicious narrowed eyes, while mattie would come over and criticize the amount of sugar i put in my tea (which is A LOT, thank you) and eat up all my lemon-poppy cakes. i am extrapolating here.
i know this is sooo many people's favorite book ever, and it pains me to not love it as much as them, it does. i really did enjoy it, but old biddy/young spunky girl syndrome grates on me a little bit.
i am going to hide in a cave now.
come to my blog!
and if i had read this when i was younger and it had been part of my life for a long time, or even if i had read it before winter's bone, it would probably have attained the five stars.
but. narratorial voice.
so the story is told from the perspective of an elderly mattie, retelling the events of What Happened to her in year 14, recollected in tranquility and all that, but this ain't no transcendentalist. she is this puritanical spinster barking crusty old testament ideals of justice into the narrative which would be great if it were offset in alternating chapters maybe, but is jarring when it slips into the thoughts of a young girl, even a young girl in which we can see the baby-roots of this prissy judgmental worldview.
and maybe a lot of people find that awesome, but me, this reader, it was like when you are just drifting off to sleep pleasantly and then you hear this mosquito, and you are like - goddammit- that thing again, and you could still drift off, but your sleep would be tainted by knowing you were probably going to wake up with a swollen itchy face. (this probably doesn't make any sense - i have a zillion things happening in my head right now so i am only giving this review 70% attention)
i can't help it, my heart belongs to ree. and i know how unfair it is to compare on book to another, but there is no way to avoid it. if i were to invite both of them for tea, ree probably wouldn't come - she would go off and shoot a squirrel and watch me with suspicious narrowed eyes, while mattie would come over and criticize the amount of sugar i put in my tea (which is A LOT, thank you) and eat up all my lemon-poppy cakes. i am extrapolating here.
i know this is sooo many people's favorite book ever, and it pains me to not love it as much as them, it does. i really did enjoy it, but old biddy/young spunky girl syndrome grates on me a little bit.
i am going to hide in a cave now.
come to my blog!
January 27, 2011
On the whole, the western genre doesn't inherently appeal to me. I'm not a modern emasculated male yearning wistfully for a time 'when men were men, and dames were etc.' I am relatively content being a gangly Gentile nebbish afraid of his own shadow and estranged from his natural heritage of hunting, foraging, and defecating unashamedly in a shallow hole behind a cactus. Nothing at the heart of my being cries out for a pistol, a lariat, or a fitful night on the prairie punctuated by the wails of a coyote or the whooping of a marauding Indian band. I am neither a hero nor a survivor by nature. I am an endurer, an eker—an avowed anti-Rousseauist who cringes at dirt, bugs, heat, and peril. Especially peril. As a consequence, I don't find many vicarious pleasures in the western genre, per se. The strong, silent gunslinger isn't an ideal of mine, even in the wildest, farthest-flung reaches of my imagination where I let the 'what-if' impulse have free reign. Although I try to keep an open mind (but often fail), I can't help but find the idealization of these steely male archetypes childish and self-negating. Not childish in the sense of enjoying the healthy play of imagination, but childish in the pejorative sense of stunted and entirely reactionary. But I'm being priggish again.
Meanwhile, True Grit is in fact a western, and I enjoyed it very much. I toyed with the idea of giving it five stars, but I feel as though I've become slutty in my star disbursals lately and—truth be told—the climax is a bit much, with misfortunes seeming to compound in a extravagant way.
In order for genre fiction—and in this case the western particularly—to work for me, it must transcend its status as genre fiction. It can't only be, say, a simple, classic western narrative with the usual livery trappings, populated by braggadocio and swagger and a mouthful of chaw because I don't fetishize these things. These aren't enough for it to be enjoyable. True Grit more than satisfies this requirement for me. As you probably already know, either from the book itself or its two film adaptations, it's a story told by a teenage girl, which already tweaks the genre out of its usual torpor. She—the heroine, Mattie Ross—is an old-fashioned eccentric: precocious, indomitable, moralistic but practical, pedantic, stubborn, loquacious, and—because of all these traits—contrary to the western archetype of the teenage girl. Of course, I say the 'western archetype' very loosely because is there really an archetype for girls? If there is one, it probably doesn't extend much further than the idea of a pigtailed girl fetching water from a well or praying in school in her ankle boots and gingham. Or maybe I swiped that from Little House on the Prairie.
I won't dwell too much on the book itself because its story is fairly well-known. Mattie employs a drunken, one-eyed Federal marshal of dubious lawfulness to avenge her father's death. Along the way, they join forces with a puffed-up Texas Ranger who's chasing the same man for a reward in Texas. But this is neither here nor there for me because the success of True Grit depends on its generous characterizations and its wonderful ear for language. In these ways, it certainly transcends caricatured rote that hobbles so much genre fiction.
Meanwhile, True Grit is in fact a western, and I enjoyed it very much. I toyed with the idea of giving it five stars, but I feel as though I've become slutty in my star disbursals lately and—truth be told—the climax is a bit much, with misfortunes seeming to compound in a extravagant way.
In order for genre fiction—and in this case the western particularly—to work for me, it must transcend its status as genre fiction. It can't only be, say, a simple, classic western narrative with the usual livery trappings, populated by braggadocio and swagger and a mouthful of chaw because I don't fetishize these things. These aren't enough for it to be enjoyable. True Grit more than satisfies this requirement for me. As you probably already know, either from the book itself or its two film adaptations, it's a story told by a teenage girl, which already tweaks the genre out of its usual torpor. She—the heroine, Mattie Ross—is an old-fashioned eccentric: precocious, indomitable, moralistic but practical, pedantic, stubborn, loquacious, and—because of all these traits—contrary to the western archetype of the teenage girl. Of course, I say the 'western archetype' very loosely because is there really an archetype for girls? If there is one, it probably doesn't extend much further than the idea of a pigtailed girl fetching water from a well or praying in school in her ankle boots and gingham. Or maybe I swiped that from Little House on the Prairie.
I won't dwell too much on the book itself because its story is fairly well-known. Mattie employs a drunken, one-eyed Federal marshal of dubious lawfulness to avenge her father's death. Along the way, they join forces with a puffed-up Texas Ranger who's chasing the same man for a reward in Texas. But this is neither here nor there for me because the success of True Grit depends on its generous characterizations and its wonderful ear for language. In these ways, it certainly transcends caricatured rote that hobbles so much genre fiction.
May 2, 2022
This slender 1968 novel surprised me by being funny. Not outrageously funny, not slyly funny, but dead-pan-I'm-not-going-to-spell-it-out-for-you-funny. The subtly smirking dialog-heavy action made short work of an already short book. Mattie is a crotchety and impossible teen narrator, and there are few truly happy endings on the old open range, but I was still left ruefully smiling.
True Grit is nearly three quarters of a century old, with all the caveats that come with that, but if you're a critical and considering reader, it's a fine way to spend an afternoon, loping in the company of the extremely memorable Mattie Ross.
True Grit is nearly three quarters of a century old, with all the caveats that come with that, but if you're a critical and considering reader, it's a fine way to spend an afternoon, loping in the company of the extremely memorable Mattie Ross.
June 26, 2023
The story of dynamic Mattie Ross, a spunky 14 -year -old girl, from Yell County Arkansas, who seeks justice , when her beloved father is treacherously murdered, on the streets by the reprehensible outlaw Tom Chaney in Fort Smith, in the Razorback State. Set in the late 1870's , the kid soon understands this, nobody wants to risk their precious life for free, to capture the dangerous fugitive . Informed that the one-eyed, patch wearing Rooster Cogburn, is the toughest marshal in town , working for the famous or is it infamous hanging Judge Isaac Parker, a historical figure. He shoots first and asks questions later, as over a dozen deceased outlaws have found out too late, Cogburn will track down the criminal for a generous fee, in the lawless, nearby Oklahoma Territory were Chaney has gone , but is known to take a drink or two...maybe a little more. Mattie has to sells some of her dad's belongings, her family needs the money at home, negotiating with Colonel Stonehill, to sell back her father's unneeded horses to him . Discussions deteriorate rapidly, the back and forth nature of them get hot under the collar, the unyielding girl constantly threatening the Colonel by evoking the name J. Noble Daggett , her never seen unknown lawyer, does he actually exist ? Stonehill cannot believe his ears, just to rid himself of the relentless onslaught, the pest, he gives her generous terms... hoping that it is the last time the Colonel is in her presence...the best scene in the novel. Going to the home of Rooster to pay the marshal, Mattie finds him living in the back of a dilapidated store and drunk ...So he drinks some , (everyone does ) like a fish. His only friends are General Sterling Price , his very independent cat as they are all and the card playing Chinese owner who likes to gamble. Later, LaBoeuf an unimpressive Texas Ranger, (a lawman not a baseball player) wants to join them in apprehending Chaney, reluctantly they agree. After a long, hard chase through the rough countryside , meeting many unwanted obstacles, Cogburn and friends find Tom, who has become a member of the notorious Ned Pepper gang, a group of nefarious killers, a very rip roaring finish to this fine book. The authentic sounding and speaking characters for that period, makes this western believable and they become real people...A must read for anyone interested in the Old West...or just great entertainment...
July 10, 2023
True Grit was written by Charles Portis, published in 1968, and later made into a movie. It is based in Arkansas in the 1870s and told from the perspective of 14-year-old Mattie Ross. Mattie's father was murdered by Tom Cheney who escaped into Indian territory. Mattie wants revenge (death) for the murder of her father and she is bound and determined to make sure it happens.
Mattie has tremendous grit, gumption, perseverance, determination, negotiation skills, and an "I won't back down" attitude.
Donna Tartt, an accomplished author, does an exceptional job narrating the audiobook.
Highly recommend!
Mattie has tremendous grit, gumption, perseverance, determination, negotiation skills, and an "I won't back down" attitude.
Donna Tartt, an accomplished author, does an exceptional job narrating the audiobook.
Highly recommend!
December 28, 2010
Treasure of the Rubbermaids: The Dude Vs. The Duke
Sometimes you get very clear signs that you should read or re-read a specific book. Earlier this year, my friend Nancy had read True Grit and recommended it to me. I’d seen the John Wayne movie version a couple of times, and I had a hazy memory that I’d read it at some point. The more I thought about it, I was pretty sure that I’d even owned a very old copy of the book once upon a time.
Months later, I heard that the Coen brothers were doing a new movie version with Jeff Bridges taking John Wayne’s place as Rooster. I’m not a fan of the recent wave of remakes Hollywood has produced since the movie studios are too gutless to risk money on new concepts anymore, but with the Coen brothers saying that they were doing another adaptation of the book, not a remake of the original film, I thought it had potential. Hell, you’ve got The Dude replacing The Duke. I thought it’d be worth seeing just for that alone.
Meanwhile, my father made good on a threat he’d been making since the wife and I bought our first house last year and brought down 14 large plastic containers filled with books and comics that I’d kept at my parents due to lack of storage during my apartment dwelling years.
So the new movie version of True Grit came out and was getting rave reviews, and I wanted to see it. I also wanted to re-read the book at some point. The other day, I started going through the boxes and in the first one I popped open, there sat a battered old hardback of True Grit.
Verily, the Reading Gods had delivered unto me a sign.
After going and seeing the movie yesterday and enjoying it immensely, I cracked open the book last night and rediscovered a story written in what certainly feels like authentic Old West speech. The tale of young Maddie Ross hiring a drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal to track and arrest her father’s killer is one of those books told in a such a simple style that it can trick you into missing how much there is between the lines.
Told in first person from the whip-smart but extremely headstrong, stubborn and uptight Maddie, the portrait of the time and people like Rooster and the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf and Lucky Ned Pepper feel like you’re reading a story written back then and not in 1969. It’s funny, bittersweet and loaded with all the action on horseback that any western fan could ask for.
If all you know of this story is the cheesy memories of the old John Wayne version, then check this book out and go see the new version. You won’t be disappointed.
Sometimes you get very clear signs that you should read or re-read a specific book. Earlier this year, my friend Nancy had read True Grit and recommended it to me. I’d seen the John Wayne movie version a couple of times, and I had a hazy memory that I’d read it at some point. The more I thought about it, I was pretty sure that I’d even owned a very old copy of the book once upon a time.
Months later, I heard that the Coen brothers were doing a new movie version with Jeff Bridges taking John Wayne’s place as Rooster. I’m not a fan of the recent wave of remakes Hollywood has produced since the movie studios are too gutless to risk money on new concepts anymore, but with the Coen brothers saying that they were doing another adaptation of the book, not a remake of the original film, I thought it had potential. Hell, you’ve got The Dude replacing The Duke. I thought it’d be worth seeing just for that alone.
Meanwhile, my father made good on a threat he’d been making since the wife and I bought our first house last year and brought down 14 large plastic containers filled with books and comics that I’d kept at my parents due to lack of storage during my apartment dwelling years.
So the new movie version of True Grit came out and was getting rave reviews, and I wanted to see it. I also wanted to re-read the book at some point. The other day, I started going through the boxes and in the first one I popped open, there sat a battered old hardback of True Grit.
Verily, the Reading Gods had delivered unto me a sign.
After going and seeing the movie yesterday and enjoying it immensely, I cracked open the book last night and rediscovered a story written in what certainly feels like authentic Old West speech. The tale of young Maddie Ross hiring a drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal to track and arrest her father’s killer is one of those books told in a such a simple style that it can trick you into missing how much there is between the lines.
Told in first person from the whip-smart but extremely headstrong, stubborn and uptight Maddie, the portrait of the time and people like Rooster and the Texas Ranger LaBoeuf and Lucky Ned Pepper feel like you’re reading a story written back then and not in 1969. It’s funny, bittersweet and loaded with all the action on horseback that any western fan could ask for.
If all you know of this story is the cheesy memories of the old John Wayne version, then check this book out and go see the new version. You won’t be disappointed.
August 20, 2015
Wow, what a great story! Mattie Ross is just 14 years old when she hooks up with Rooster Cogburn, the “meanest” U.S. Marshal, to avenge her father, killed by an outlaw who took advantage of his good nature.
Mattie endures bad weather, illness, grueling hours on horseback, runs into outlaws, and fights off rattlesnakes. She’s tough-talking, honest, loyal, fearless, and I enjoyed every moment with her. I also loved the realistic historical details and well-drawn secondary characters. The gruff and unkempt Rooster Cogburn was a perfect match for the stubborn and willful teenager.
Mattie’s thoughts and exchanges with Rooster were hilarious.
The story is told by Mattie 50 years later. She is wealthy, unmarried, churchgoing, and as spirited as she was when she was a teen.
Though I’ve never been a fan of John Wayne films, I really enjoyed this classic. The remake, directed by the Coen brothers and starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, is also well worth watching.
Mattie endures bad weather, illness, grueling hours on horseback, runs into outlaws, and fights off rattlesnakes. She’s tough-talking, honest, loyal, fearless, and I enjoyed every moment with her. I also loved the realistic historical details and well-drawn secondary characters. The gruff and unkempt Rooster Cogburn was a perfect match for the stubborn and willful teenager.
Mattie’s thoughts and exchanges with Rooster were hilarious.
“Nature tells us to rest after meals and people who are too busy to heed that inner voice are often dead at the age of fifty years."
“I had hated these ponies for the part they played in my father’s death but now I realized the notion was fanciful, that it was wrong to charge blame to these pretty beasts who knew neither good nor evil but only innocence. I say that of these ponies. I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?”
The story is told by Mattie 50 years later. She is wealthy, unmarried, churchgoing, and as spirited as she was when she was a teen.
Though I’ve never been a fan of John Wayne films, I really enjoyed this classic. The remake, directed by the Coen brothers and starring Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, is also well worth watching.
September 8, 2019
It was 1878 the year that Mattie’s father, Frank Ross, was shot and killed by Tom Chaney. Mattie was only fourteen, but filled with a need to avenge her father’s murder. So she leaves her home and family in Arkansas filled with determination and a need to locate a U.S. Marshal by the name of Rooster Cogburn – a man with a reputation for being an excellent shot despite having only one eye, a less-than pleasant temperament, and an alcoholic.
”The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.”
Needless to say, things don’t go as smoothly as either one of them hopes or plans on, which only adds to the charm of this story.
This is shared from the perspective of time - after many decades have passed, and although Mattie is no longer the young unsophisticated young lady she once was, she remains as unsentimental, and direct in the no-nonsense manner as she in her youth, which adds a captivating, if slightly ironic, humour to this story.
”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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”
I’m not sure how it is that I had never read this, have never seen the movie(s) with John Wayne (1969) or the later one with Jeff Bridges playing Rooster Cogburn, but I’m so glad that I have finally read this, have met and traveled along with Mattie as she searched for justice for herself, her father and family.
”The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.”
Needless to say, things don’t go as smoothly as either one of them hopes or plans on, which only adds to the charm of this story.
This is shared from the perspective of time - after many decades have passed, and although Mattie is no longer the young unsophisticated young lady she once was, she remains as unsentimental, and direct in the no-nonsense manner as she in her youth, which adds a captivating, if slightly ironic, humour to this story.
”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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.”
I’m not sure how it is that I had never read this, have never seen the movie(s) with John Wayne (1969) or the later one with Jeff Bridges playing Rooster Cogburn, but I’m so glad that I have finally read this, have met and traveled along with Mattie as she searched for justice for herself, her father and family.
April 26, 2019
"Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale" says one of my favorite narrators ever, 14-year-old Mattie Ross, who is engaged in hunting down her father's killer. She's recruited the nastiest character she can find, a fat drunken murderer named Rooster Cogburn, and she's out to the Wild West with blood on her mind.
Prim, judgey, business-minded, cold-blooded, pitiless, Mattie leaves you in little doubt about whether she can use the gun she's carrying or who's in charge of this escapade. Cogburn, and their picked-up dandified hanger-on LaBoeuf, both think they can take control of the mission and the story at various times; they're wrong.
Kim Darby in the 1969 movie version. John Wayne won an Oscar for his role as Rooster Cogburn; typical that the old man gets all the attention. Mattie is the protagonist of this book.
Mattie's voice is so complete and powerful that she distracts you from the fact that this is essentially a white knight story. It's a nice change, since a man writing a book about a 14-year-old girl without getting obsessed with her chastity is like a middle-aged dad getting through a conversation without mentioning his lawn.
Haley Steinfeld as Mattie in the 2010 Coen version. I of course haven't seen either of these, I never watch movies.
Anyway, I point that out but it doesn't ruin the book for me. The book is entirely about Mattie, and she's terrific. “What have you done when you have bested a fool?” asks Mattie dismissively, and you're like fuck yeah, girl, best 'em all.
Prim, judgey, business-minded, cold-blooded, pitiless, Mattie leaves you in little doubt about whether she can use the gun she's carrying or who's in charge of this escapade. Cogburn, and their picked-up dandified hanger-on LaBoeuf, both think they can take control of the mission and the story at various times; they're wrong.
Kim Darby in the 1969 movie version. John Wayne won an Oscar for his role as Rooster Cogburn; typical that the old man gets all the attention. Mattie is the protagonist of this book.
Mattie's voice is so complete and powerful that she distracts you from the fact that this is essentially a white knight story. It's a nice change, since a man writing a book about a 14-year-old girl without getting obsessed with her chastity is like a middle-aged dad getting through a conversation without mentioning his lawn.
Haley Steinfeld as Mattie in the 2010 Coen version. I of course haven't seen either of these, I never watch movies.
Anyway, I point that out but it doesn't ruin the book for me. The book is entirely about Mattie, and she's terrific. “What have you done when you have bested a fool?” asks Mattie dismissively, and you're like fuck yeah, girl, best 'em all.
September 14, 2015
"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the winter-time to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."
This is exactly what Mattie Ross, now on my list of all-time favorite narrators/protagonists, sets out to do in this entertaining and adventure-filled western. The industrious Mattie hires Deputy Marshall Rooster Cogburn to search for her father’s killer in the formidable Indian Territory. Not to be left out of the action, Mattie insists on coming along for the ride. A thorn in both Rooster’s and Mattie’s sides, Texas Ranger LaBoeuf joins them as he has his own reasons for capturing this loathsome killer. Told with simple and straightforward prose, True Grit has wonderful moments of comical banter between Rooster, "an old one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of Grover Cleveland", the handsome but insolent LaBoeuf, and the spunky, intelligent Mattie Ross herself. Despite the discomfort of the journey, the uncertainty of the outcome, and the fear of the perils she encounters, Mattie refuses to give up and remains true to her goal of seeking justice. She haggles with the shrewdest of men and stands up to their relentless jabs about her age and gender as a hindrance to their mission. My only complaint with the book - I wish it could have been a bit longer so I could have relished it even more. It seemed to end way too fast for one I was enjoying so much!
I can’t resist adding a couple of my favorite quotes here:
"I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains."
"I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well that is superstitious claptrap. My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33."
Don’t let the "western" genre turn you away from this great little book if you have any appreciation for a little piece of the American landscape, thrilling encounters with infamous outlaws, superb and cutting dialogue, and plucky female heroines. Thoroughly engaging throughout, True Grit seriously had me on the edge of my seat with the book gripped tightly in my hands during the dramatic climax. Can’t wait to re-watch the movie now!
This is exactly what Mattie Ross, now on my list of all-time favorite narrators/protagonists, sets out to do in this entertaining and adventure-filled western. The industrious Mattie hires Deputy Marshall Rooster Cogburn to search for her father’s killer in the formidable Indian Territory. Not to be left out of the action, Mattie insists on coming along for the ride. A thorn in both Rooster’s and Mattie’s sides, Texas Ranger LaBoeuf joins them as he has his own reasons for capturing this loathsome killer. Told with simple and straightforward prose, True Grit has wonderful moments of comical banter between Rooster, "an old one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of Grover Cleveland", the handsome but insolent LaBoeuf, and the spunky, intelligent Mattie Ross herself. Despite the discomfort of the journey, the uncertainty of the outcome, and the fear of the perils she encounters, Mattie refuses to give up and remains true to her goal of seeking justice. She haggles with the shrewdest of men and stands up to their relentless jabs about her age and gender as a hindrance to their mission. My only complaint with the book - I wish it could have been a bit longer so I could have relished it even more. It seemed to end way too fast for one I was enjoying so much!
I can’t resist adding a couple of my favorite quotes here:
"I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains."
"I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces? Some preachers will say, well that is superstitious claptrap. My answer is this: Preacher, go to your Bible and read Luke 8: 26-33."
Don’t let the "western" genre turn you away from this great little book if you have any appreciation for a little piece of the American landscape, thrilling encounters with infamous outlaws, superb and cutting dialogue, and plucky female heroines. Thoroughly engaging throughout, True Grit seriously had me on the edge of my seat with the book gripped tightly in my hands during the dramatic climax. Can’t wait to re-watch the movie now!
June 30, 2014
I love this book!
I was barely starting to read it and I was already amazed of how much I was enjoying the reading experience and how much I like the way how it was written.
Definitely I want to read other books by Charles Portis and I hope to do it in the near future.
I wasn't ignorant about the story due I remember that I watched the film with John Wayne at some moment and definitely I watched the recent remake with Jeff Bridges.
I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.
I chose to read the book mainly on the basis that I want to include some westerns in my shelves and in that way to add this genre to my range of literary genres.
However, I never expected to get hooked in the way that I got, even with a story that basically I knew what happens. But the selection of words by the author and the mix of clever humor with hardboiled drama was a wonderful experience.
I read about the other books by Portis and I am glad to see that almost all get in the range of western-like stories and that they have that same combination of humor and drama.
I am sure that Portis can easily become one of my new favorite authors.
Charles Portis is a master creating characters, the young and determined Mattie Ross, the rude and bold "Rooster" Cogburn, and even LaBoeuf, that he didn't click to me on the recent film, I learned to understood the character here on the original novel.
And I can assure you that the rest of characters not matter how small their parts can be, they were quite well developed.
Something that I liked too, it's that since this is a story about vengeance, well, vengeance has its price, you can't expect to embrace that dark feeling and thinking that you will be able to get back to your life without changes and obviously without spoiling anything, you will realize what I mean, if you read this great book.
You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.
The title of the novel, True Grit is chosen in an excellent way resuming the heart and soul of the story.
Definitely one of the best western novels that you can read.
Highly recommended.
I was barely starting to read it and I was already amazed of how much I was enjoying the reading experience and how much I like the way how it was written.
Definitely I want to read other books by Charles Portis and I hope to do it in the near future.
I wasn't ignorant about the story due I remember that I watched the film with John Wayne at some moment and definitely I watched the recent remake with Jeff Bridges.
I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.
I chose to read the book mainly on the basis that I want to include some westerns in my shelves and in that way to add this genre to my range of literary genres.
However, I never expected to get hooked in the way that I got, even with a story that basically I knew what happens. But the selection of words by the author and the mix of clever humor with hardboiled drama was a wonderful experience.
I read about the other books by Portis and I am glad to see that almost all get in the range of western-like stories and that they have that same combination of humor and drama.
I am sure that Portis can easily become one of my new favorite authors.
Charles Portis is a master creating characters, the young and determined Mattie Ross, the rude and bold "Rooster" Cogburn, and even LaBoeuf, that he didn't click to me on the recent film, I learned to understood the character here on the original novel.
And I can assure you that the rest of characters not matter how small their parts can be, they were quite well developed.
Something that I liked too, it's that since this is a story about vengeance, well, vengeance has its price, you can't expect to embrace that dark feeling and thinking that you will be able to get back to your life without changes and obviously without spoiling anything, you will realize what I mean, if you read this great book.
You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.
The title of the novel, True Grit is chosen in an excellent way resuming the heart and soul of the story.
Definitely one of the best western novels that you can read.
Highly recommended.
May 30, 2020
A good story, is a story well told. And True Grit is such a story: pure story-telling ; with great characters. Nothing happens much for half of the book, but it is in the last hundred pages that real action happens that thrills you, and thrills you good. But it is the prose that is the unmistakable hallmark of the novel; the dialogues were crafted so beautifully that you want to read them again and again; and reading was, in itself, a pleasure. Very few books have this combination: excellent prose and story-telling.
Highly Recommended.
Highly Recommended.
December 11, 2020
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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.Thus begins True Grit, a seemingly simple novel about a girl in the 1870s who hires an aging, morally questionable US Marshall named Rooster Cogburn to help her track down her father’s killer. In plot, it is pretty standard Western stuff, an adventure tale of loyalty and vengeance told with horses and bartering, outlaws and gunfights, hostile weather and hostile wildlife.
So what makes this book a classic, and the top-rated Western on Goodreads? That would be the main character and narrator, Mattie Ross. She is a wholly original, completely fascinating character. Whip smart, cynical, unwilling to tolerate fools, the kind of person who when offered a drink by a drunk would respond to his face “I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains.” I have not seen either of the movies made of this book, so in my mind I kept picturing Greta Thunburg as Mattie, eye rolling her elders, supremely confident in the correctness of her path.
True Grit is the kind of book that reminds me why I enjoy reading challenges. If there was not a “read a Western” prompt in one of my challenges this year, I would never have picked up this book (or picked up Blood Meridian last year when the same prompt was in a different challenge). Darkly funny, and full of great quotes, this was a very enjoyable read. Highly recommended.
March 10, 2016
I write this from the little town of Fort Smith, Arkansas – the place where Arkansans go if they can't take the heaving, helter-skelter metropolis of Little Rock. It seemed at first to be a rather unliterary place: when I asked around for a local bookshop, passers-by could direct me only to the Revelation Christian Bookstore, which seems to have staked its business model on bland modern Bible translations and pro-life bumper stickers. So it was quite a pleasant surprise finally to hit upon True Grit and to hear the voice of Mattie Ross laying out her story:
This is a novel that lives or dies on the strength of Mattie's narration – and it's pitch-perfect. She is gruff and determined and unsentimental, relating the most dramatic scenes with an endearingly deadpan matter-of-factness; she's also completely humourless (‘We have always liked jokes in our family and I think they are alright in their place’), which often makes her narrative hilarious in ways that she does not really intend.
It seems like a simple narrative simply told, but from about the third paragraph I was already feeling hugely impressed by how Portis was putting it together, with a sly wit coming through in all kinds of clever little constructions and inverted expectations. As for instance when Mattie asks the Fort Smith sheriff who the best local marshal might be:
Joining Mattie and Rooster on their quest into Indian territory is the dandyish Texas Ranger called LaBoeuf, whose name – pronounced "la beef" – struck a chord with me, because I had already embarrassed myself by mentioning the nearby park of Petit Jean to my Uber driver and pronouncing it the French way. (He calls it "pet it gene".)
What follows is a travelogue that works both as a traditional Western and as a gentle puncturing of Western traditions. The language is shot through with beautiful regionalisms like blue-john and middlebuster, and out-West figures of speech about waddies and the hoot-owl trail and so forth, most of which Mattie dutifully encloses in inverted commas. Her dryness means the characters are allowed to emerge quite slowly from the text, with none of the literary grandstanding that is so annoying in so much modern literary fiction. At moments of high emotion, Mattie can say simply
…where modern authors, obsessed with the idea that they're not allowed to ‘tell’ anything, would write a paragraph of bullshit about how a flush of pleasure stole into the Texan's weatherbeaten cheeks and an unaccustomed smile played around his lips. Here the details are much richer for being supplied by the reader him- or herself.
This is one of those books that I will be recommending to everyone, because it's something that even people who don't read much are likely to fall in love with. I can't help looking forward to when my daughter's old enough to give her a copy. And Mattie's tendency to lace her story with Sunday-School scriptural verses means I'll be suggesting that it's added to the shelves of Fort Smith's premier religious bookstore, post-haste.
I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.
This is a novel that lives or dies on the strength of Mattie's narration – and it's pitch-perfect. She is gruff and determined and unsentimental, relating the most dramatic scenes with an endearingly deadpan matter-of-factness; she's also completely humourless (‘We have always liked jokes in our family and I think they are alright in their place’), which often makes her narrative hilarious in ways that she does not really intend.
It seems like a simple narrative simply told, but from about the third paragraph I was already feeling hugely impressed by how Portis was putting it together, with a sly wit coming through in all kinds of clever little constructions and inverted expectations. As for instance when Mattie asks the Fort Smith sheriff who the best local marshal might be:
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, “I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L. T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.”
I said, “Where can I find this Rooster?”
Joining Mattie and Rooster on their quest into Indian territory is the dandyish Texas Ranger called LaBoeuf, whose name – pronounced "la beef" – struck a chord with me, because I had already embarrassed myself by mentioning the nearby park of Petit Jean to my Uber driver and pronouncing it the French way. (He calls it "pet it gene".)
What follows is a travelogue that works both as a traditional Western and as a gentle puncturing of Western traditions. The language is shot through with beautiful regionalisms like blue-john and middlebuster, and out-West figures of speech about waddies and the hoot-owl trail and so forth, most of which Mattie dutifully encloses in inverted commas. Her dryness means the characters are allowed to emerge quite slowly from the text, with none of the literary grandstanding that is so annoying in so much modern literary fiction. At moments of high emotion, Mattie can say simply
LaBoeuf was pleased with himself and he reloaded his rifle
…where modern authors, obsessed with the idea that they're not allowed to ‘tell’ anything, would write a paragraph of bullshit about how a flush of pleasure stole into the Texan's weatherbeaten cheeks and an unaccustomed smile played around his lips. Here the details are much richer for being supplied by the reader him- or herself.
This is one of those books that I will be recommending to everyone, because it's something that even people who don't read much are likely to fall in love with. I can't help looking forward to when my daughter's old enough to give her a copy. And Mattie's tendency to lace her story with Sunday-School scriptural verses means I'll be suggesting that it's added to the shelves of Fort Smith's premier religious bookstore, post-haste.
December 5, 2021
I listened the this on Audible, with the book read, somewhat bizarrely, by Donna Tartt. I like Donna Tartt as an author but, believe me, she is no actress. I wish now I'd read the book myself. I've a feeling it might then have gained all five stars...
December 23, 2016
After Huckleberry Finn probably the single greatest novel of the American West. It's been adapted twice for the films. Neither captures what makes this a book so great: the stern, judgmental, archaic, hilarious voice of the narrator, Mattie Ross. The kind of novel you find yourself revisiting every couple years. I learned more about "voice" from this story than from anything else I've ever read.
July 14, 2017
My introduction to the fiction of Charles Portis is True Grit, the 1968 novel that has long ranked at the top of my list of best opening sentences in any book. It's inspired two film adaptations, coming up short on lists of the best westerns for a lack of grandeur. But in literary form, Portis thrills with a strong point of view expressed through an unforgettable female protagonist, delights with frontier patois and satisfies the craving for a wonderfully spun yarn. It's a modestly ambitious story told on a humble scale , but one I shot through quickly and grinned at constantly, from page 1.
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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.
Mattie Ross continues her unlikely story, which begins on a cotton plantation on the south bank of the Arkansas River, near Dardanelle in Yell County. Her father departs for Fort Smith to buy some Texas cow ponies. Mattie doesn't think much of Texas or its horses, but her father sees a moneymaking scheme and takes off with one of his workers, a young man from Louisiana going by Tom Chaney who insists on tagging along. Chaney loses his wages in a card game (with some "riffraff" like himself) and when intercepted by his employer before he can exact revenge, shoots Frank Ross in the head and flees on his horse.
The young girl travels to Fort Smith to retrieve her father's body. She's accompanied by a family servant named Yarnell and upon arriving in town, takes it upon herself to put her father's affairs in order, selling back the ponies that he purchased and seeing that Tom Chaney is brought to justice. Speaking to the sheriff, Mattie learns that Chaney has linked up with a bandit named Lucky Ned Pepper and fled into the Indian Territory; this places the fugitive under the jurisdiction of the U.S. marshals. Mattie is not impressed with "Federal people" and insists on overseeing the matter herself, inquiring with the sheriff who the best marshal is.
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, "I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T.. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have."
I said, "Where can I find this Rooster?"
Mattie makes her way to the Federal Courthouse and watches as Rooster Cogburn, a surly one-eyed deputy marshal for the Western District of Arkansas, is grilled by the attorney of Odus Wharton, whose father and brother were both shot and killed by Cogburn during his arrest. Defense allegations that Cogburn is nothing more than an assassin do nothing to sway Mattie that he is the man she's looking for. Following Cogburn to the room he rents in back of a Chinese grocery, she offers to pay him a $50 reward for serving the fugitive warrant on Tom Chaney. He factors in Lucky Ned and doubles his price to $100. For that sum, Mattie insists on observing the manhunt.
The young girl's business is complicated by a sergeant in the Texas Rangers named LaBoeuf. He reveals to Mattie that Tom Chaney's real name is Theron Chelmsford and he's wanted for shooting and killing a state senator in Waco. LaBoeuf has been on Chaney's trail for four months. That duration does not impress Mattie and she notifies him that she's already hired a marshal to capture Chaney. This suits LaBoeuf, who anticipates that for an arrest in Indian Territory to stand up in court, he'll need a federal partner. Ditching the girl proves more difficult than either man considers and Mattie joins the manhunters on the road to the Indian Territory. Much banter ensues.
LaBoeuf was rubbing down his shaggy pony. He said, "You are lucky to be traveling in a place where a spring is so handy. In my country you can ride for days and see no ground water. I have lapped filthy water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it. You don't know what discomfort is until you have nearly perished for water."
Rooster said, "If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar."
"Then you don't believe it?" asked LaBoeuf.
"I believed it the first twenty-five times I heard it."
"Maybe he did drink from one," said I. "He is a Texas Ranger."
"Is that what he is?" said Rooster. "Well now, I can believe that."
LaBoeuf said, "You are getting ready to show your ignorance now, Cogburn. I don't mind a little personal chaffing, but I won't hear anything against the Ranger troop from a man like you."
"The Ranger troop!" said Rooster, with some contempt. "I tell you what you do. You go tell John Wesley Hardin about the Ranger troop. Don't tell me and sis."
"Anyhow, we know what we are about. That is more than I can say for you political marshals."
Rooster said, "How long have you boys been mounted on sheep down there?"
LaBoeuf stopped rubbing his shaggy pony. He said, "This horse will be galloping when that big American stud of yours is winded and collapsed. You cannot judge by looks. The most villainous-looking pony is o'ten your gamest performer. What would you guess this pony cost me?"
Rooster said, "If there is anything in what you say I would guess about a thousand dollars."
The outstanding quality of True Grit is the voice that Charles Portis prescribes to his narrator, Mattie Ross. While a long line of enlightened teenage sprites populate the novels and screenplays of men--Luc Besson's Leon, with Natalie Portman as a precocious girl who hires an immigrant hitman to avenge her brother's killing, is very reminiscent of this--Mattie's iron will, gift for figuring and refusal to back down is wish fulfillment on the highest order. Whether it's historically accurate is debatable, but having Mattie tell her story in her own voice and digressions is wonderful. Through her, Portis paints the bygone era of his story.
At the Federal Courthouse I learned that the head marshal had gone to Detroit, Michigan, to deliver prisoners to the "house of correction," as they called it. A deputy who worked in the office said they would get around to Tom Chaney in good time, but that he would have to wait his turn. He showed me a list of indicted outlaws that were then on the loose in the Indian Territory and it looked like the delinquent tax list that they run in the Arkansas Gazette every year in little type. I did not like the looks of that, nor did I care much for the "smarty" manner of the deputy. He was puffed up by his office. You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.
While I enjoyed the whiskey breathed bluster of Rooster Cogburn and the enigmatic qualities of LaBoeuf, the three characters don't gel together convincingly. Each seems to exist in their own novel and Portis doesn't offer enough reason why they would care anything for one another. It's not a major problem and one that one extra page of prose might have fixed. Chaney and Lucky Ned are tenacious bad guys but overall the novel is thrifty when it comes to menace or compelling action. This makes it difficult to summon much enthusiasm for the climax. The strengths of the story are in its narration and the color which Mattie uses to illustrate what she experiences on her journey.
True Grit has been filmed twice. A 1969 production adapted by Marguerite Roberts and directed by Henry Hathaway is notable as the movie John Wayne won his sole Academy Award for, playing Rooster Cogburn. Kim Darby played Mattie and Glen Campbell played LaBoeuf. In 2010, Joel and Ethan Coen adapted and directed a version that hewed closer to the novel by centering on Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld). Jeff Bridges starred as Rooster Cogburn and Matt Damon (a splitting image of young Glen Campbell) as LaBoeuf. It was a critical and commercial hit, but in my opinion, not offbeat enough for a Coen Brothers film and not thrilling enough for a western.
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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.
Mattie Ross continues her unlikely story, which begins on a cotton plantation on the south bank of the Arkansas River, near Dardanelle in Yell County. Her father departs for Fort Smith to buy some Texas cow ponies. Mattie doesn't think much of Texas or its horses, but her father sees a moneymaking scheme and takes off with one of his workers, a young man from Louisiana going by Tom Chaney who insists on tagging along. Chaney loses his wages in a card game (with some "riffraff" like himself) and when intercepted by his employer before he can exact revenge, shoots Frank Ross in the head and flees on his horse.
The young girl travels to Fort Smith to retrieve her father's body. She's accompanied by a family servant named Yarnell and upon arriving in town, takes it upon herself to put her father's affairs in order, selling back the ponies that he purchased and seeing that Tom Chaney is brought to justice. Speaking to the sheriff, Mattie learns that Chaney has linked up with a bandit named Lucky Ned Pepper and fled into the Indian Territory; this places the fugitive under the jurisdiction of the U.S. marshals. Mattie is not impressed with "Federal people" and insists on overseeing the matter herself, inquiring with the sheriff who the best marshal is.
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, "I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T.. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have."
I said, "Where can I find this Rooster?"
Mattie makes her way to the Federal Courthouse and watches as Rooster Cogburn, a surly one-eyed deputy marshal for the Western District of Arkansas, is grilled by the attorney of Odus Wharton, whose father and brother were both shot and killed by Cogburn during his arrest. Defense allegations that Cogburn is nothing more than an assassin do nothing to sway Mattie that he is the man she's looking for. Following Cogburn to the room he rents in back of a Chinese grocery, she offers to pay him a $50 reward for serving the fugitive warrant on Tom Chaney. He factors in Lucky Ned and doubles his price to $100. For that sum, Mattie insists on observing the manhunt.
The young girl's business is complicated by a sergeant in the Texas Rangers named LaBoeuf. He reveals to Mattie that Tom Chaney's real name is Theron Chelmsford and he's wanted for shooting and killing a state senator in Waco. LaBoeuf has been on Chaney's trail for four months. That duration does not impress Mattie and she notifies him that she's already hired a marshal to capture Chaney. This suits LaBoeuf, who anticipates that for an arrest in Indian Territory to stand up in court, he'll need a federal partner. Ditching the girl proves more difficult than either man considers and Mattie joins the manhunters on the road to the Indian Territory. Much banter ensues.
LaBoeuf was rubbing down his shaggy pony. He said, "You are lucky to be traveling in a place where a spring is so handy. In my country you can ride for days and see no ground water. I have lapped filthy water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it. You don't know what discomfort is until you have nearly perished for water."
Rooster said, "If I ever meet one of you Texas waddies that says he never drank from a horse track I think I will shake his hand and give him a Daniel Webster cigar."
"Then you don't believe it?" asked LaBoeuf.
"I believed it the first twenty-five times I heard it."
"Maybe he did drink from one," said I. "He is a Texas Ranger."
"Is that what he is?" said Rooster. "Well now, I can believe that."
LaBoeuf said, "You are getting ready to show your ignorance now, Cogburn. I don't mind a little personal chaffing, but I won't hear anything against the Ranger troop from a man like you."
"The Ranger troop!" said Rooster, with some contempt. "I tell you what you do. You go tell John Wesley Hardin about the Ranger troop. Don't tell me and sis."
"Anyhow, we know what we are about. That is more than I can say for you political marshals."
Rooster said, "How long have you boys been mounted on sheep down there?"
LaBoeuf stopped rubbing his shaggy pony. He said, "This horse will be galloping when that big American stud of yours is winded and collapsed. You cannot judge by looks. The most villainous-looking pony is o'ten your gamest performer. What would you guess this pony cost me?"
Rooster said, "If there is anything in what you say I would guess about a thousand dollars."
The outstanding quality of True Grit is the voice that Charles Portis prescribes to his narrator, Mattie Ross. While a long line of enlightened teenage sprites populate the novels and screenplays of men--Luc Besson's Leon, with Natalie Portman as a precocious girl who hires an immigrant hitman to avenge her brother's killing, is very reminiscent of this--Mattie's iron will, gift for figuring and refusal to back down is wish fulfillment on the highest order. Whether it's historically accurate is debatable, but having Mattie tell her story in her own voice and digressions is wonderful. Through her, Portis paints the bygone era of his story.
At the Federal Courthouse I learned that the head marshal had gone to Detroit, Michigan, to deliver prisoners to the "house of correction," as they called it. A deputy who worked in the office said they would get around to Tom Chaney in good time, but that he would have to wait his turn. He showed me a list of indicted outlaws that were then on the loose in the Indian Territory and it looked like the delinquent tax list that they run in the Arkansas Gazette every year in little type. I did not like the looks of that, nor did I care much for the "smarty" manner of the deputy. He was puffed up by his office. You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.
While I enjoyed the whiskey breathed bluster of Rooster Cogburn and the enigmatic qualities of LaBoeuf, the three characters don't gel together convincingly. Each seems to exist in their own novel and Portis doesn't offer enough reason why they would care anything for one another. It's not a major problem and one that one extra page of prose might have fixed. Chaney and Lucky Ned are tenacious bad guys but overall the novel is thrifty when it comes to menace or compelling action. This makes it difficult to summon much enthusiasm for the climax. The strengths of the story are in its narration and the color which Mattie uses to illustrate what she experiences on her journey.
True Grit has been filmed twice. A 1969 production adapted by Marguerite Roberts and directed by Henry Hathaway is notable as the movie John Wayne won his sole Academy Award for, playing Rooster Cogburn. Kim Darby played Mattie and Glen Campbell played LaBoeuf. In 2010, Joel and Ethan Coen adapted and directed a version that hewed closer to the novel by centering on Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld). Jeff Bridges starred as Rooster Cogburn and Matt Damon (a splitting image of young Glen Campbell) as LaBoeuf. It was a critical and commercial hit, but in my opinion, not offbeat enough for a Coen Brothers film and not thrilling enough for a western.
July 29, 2016
A timeless classic of heroism, adventure, and coming of age that I found to be both thrilling and funny. The tale of how a 14-year old girl from Arkansas comes to avenge the murder of her father in 1878 is so pure and elegant, it can’t help but make you believe in the power of righteous determination to right the ills of the world. Told from the perspective of a straitlaced spinster decades later, we get a jaundiced eye on the human condition that puts human weakness and courage in a wonderful perspective. A personal hook for me was the setting of most of the action in eastern Ozarch parts of the future Oklahoma where I grew up.
On learning of her father’s death, Mattie leaves her grieving mother and siblings and sets out from Fort Sill, Arkansas, to collect his body. Upon learning the culprit Chaney has escaped into the lawless lands of Indian Territory, she sets about finding a man she can hire who is sufficiently mean and capable enough to find him and kill him if necessary. The man she carefully picks, Rooster Cogburn, is a middle-aged, one-eyed, fat alcoholic, but she believes he has the necessary “true grit” to get the job done. According to the sheriff: “He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.” When she first encounters Cogburn, he is testifying in court against a captured murderer, where the defense he has to admit killing 23 bad guys in the course of his work going after felons hiding out in Indian Territory. She has found her man.
If you have seen the first movie based on the book, you can’t help but hold the aging John Wayne in your mind for the marshall. But there was a corny outlook to that version, and the more recent Coen brothers’ movie, with Jeff Bridges as Cogburn, is closer to Portis’ tone in the novel, its absurdist flavor and deadpan humor. See this Web page for an informative filmography (as an aside, the piece makes me wish for a Coen adaptation of DeWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers”, which appears to owe much to “True Grit”). An underground theme handled better in the second movie is the need for Cogburn to achieve some form of redemption for brutal deeds committed in the service with the infamous Quantrill Raiders during the Civil War. Mattie’s sense of Cogburn as a sort of surrogate for her lost father is also fulfilled better with that movie’s coverage of her efforts to track him down 25 years later.
Portis on the set with Wayne during the making of the 1969 film version
Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld as Cogburn and Mattie in the 2010 movie
The word that best characterizes Mattie in this story is relentless. In that way, she is in the same league with Larsson’s Salander, although she does not stray to the dark side of “Breaking Bad” like the latter. Early in the tale, she shrewdly negotiates a contract with Cogburn, forges a scheme to accompany him against his wishes, and wangles a horse and money out of a stock trader by threatening a lawsuit against him for liability in the theft of her father’s horse by Chaney. An ex-Texas ranger, LaBoeuf (pronounced “La Beef”), horns in on their quest, seeking the large bounty on Chaney’s head for killing a state senator. Mattie provokes him mercilessly over his mercenary ways, bragging, and dandified airs. As Chaney has joined up with the bandit gang of Lucky Ned Pepper, she gives in on having an extra man on the mission. But she gets her way on joining the two through implacability that garners their respect.
When asked to ID her father’s body, we see how readily she can set aside her grieving in favor of the job she needs to do:
“I said,”That is my father.” I stood there looking at him. What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!
The Irishman said, “If ye would loike to kiss him it will be all roight.”
I said, “No, put a lid on it.”
This sample shows Portis’ mixture of plain prose in perfect declarative sentences and aptness in capturing local idioms he was steeped from his Arkansas origins. The full sentences used in dialogue is abnormal, but perhaps they could be seen as reflecting Mattie’s proper schooling as she writes from a distant future. Overall, I was totally charmed to delighted laughter with the speech he pulls out of his characters. For example, when Cogburn corners and exchanges gunfire with some thieves in a cabin, he demands to know who is inside and gets the answer: “A Methodist and a son of a bitch! … Keep riding!” I was particularly tickled with the floury speech of the stock trader near the beginning:.
“The killer has flown to the Territory and is now on the scout there.”
“This is what I heard.”
“He will find plenty of his own stamp there,” said he. “Birds of a feather. It is a sink of crime. Not a day goes by but there comes some new report of a farmer bludgeoned, a wife outraged, or a blameless traveler set upon and cut down in a sanguinary ambuscade. The civilizing arts of commerce do not flourish there.”
At the end of the 2004 edition of this 1968 book, Donna Tartt explains why it is a masterpiece for her and four generations of her family:
Mattie’s narrative tone is naive, didactic, hardheaded, and completely lacking in self-consciousness—and, at times unintentionally hilarious … A great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses. She quotes scripture; she explains and gives advice to the reader; her observations are often overlaid with a decorative glaze of Sunday School piety. And her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters—lawmen and outlaws alike—to richly comic effect.
On learning of her father’s death, Mattie leaves her grieving mother and siblings and sets out from Fort Sill, Arkansas, to collect his body. Upon learning the culprit Chaney has escaped into the lawless lands of Indian Territory, she sets about finding a man she can hire who is sufficiently mean and capable enough to find him and kill him if necessary. The man she carefully picks, Rooster Cogburn, is a middle-aged, one-eyed, fat alcoholic, but she believes he has the necessary “true grit” to get the job done. According to the sheriff: “He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork.” When she first encounters Cogburn, he is testifying in court against a captured murderer, where the defense he has to admit killing 23 bad guys in the course of his work going after felons hiding out in Indian Territory. She has found her man.
If you have seen the first movie based on the book, you can’t help but hold the aging John Wayne in your mind for the marshall. But there was a corny outlook to that version, and the more recent Coen brothers’ movie, with Jeff Bridges as Cogburn, is closer to Portis’ tone in the novel, its absurdist flavor and deadpan humor. See this Web page for an informative filmography (as an aside, the piece makes me wish for a Coen adaptation of DeWitt’s “The Sisters Brothers”, which appears to owe much to “True Grit”). An underground theme handled better in the second movie is the need for Cogburn to achieve some form of redemption for brutal deeds committed in the service with the infamous Quantrill Raiders during the Civil War. Mattie’s sense of Cogburn as a sort of surrogate for her lost father is also fulfilled better with that movie’s coverage of her efforts to track him down 25 years later.
Portis on the set with Wayne during the making of the 1969 film version
Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld as Cogburn and Mattie in the 2010 movie
The word that best characterizes Mattie in this story is relentless. In that way, she is in the same league with Larsson’s Salander, although she does not stray to the dark side of “Breaking Bad” like the latter. Early in the tale, she shrewdly negotiates a contract with Cogburn, forges a scheme to accompany him against his wishes, and wangles a horse and money out of a stock trader by threatening a lawsuit against him for liability in the theft of her father’s horse by Chaney. An ex-Texas ranger, LaBoeuf (pronounced “La Beef”), horns in on their quest, seeking the large bounty on Chaney’s head for killing a state senator. Mattie provokes him mercilessly over his mercenary ways, bragging, and dandified airs. As Chaney has joined up with the bandit gang of Lucky Ned Pepper, she gives in on having an extra man on the mission. But she gets her way on joining the two through implacability that garners their respect.
When asked to ID her father’s body, we see how readily she can set aside her grieving in favor of the job she needs to do:
“I said,”That is my father.” I stood there looking at him. What a waste! Tom Chaney would pay for this! I would not rest easy until that Louisiana cur was roasting and screaming in hell!
The Irishman said, “If ye would loike to kiss him it will be all roight.”
I said, “No, put a lid on it.”
This sample shows Portis’ mixture of plain prose in perfect declarative sentences and aptness in capturing local idioms he was steeped from his Arkansas origins. The full sentences used in dialogue is abnormal, but perhaps they could be seen as reflecting Mattie’s proper schooling as she writes from a distant future. Overall, I was totally charmed to delighted laughter with the speech he pulls out of his characters. For example, when Cogburn corners and exchanges gunfire with some thieves in a cabin, he demands to know who is inside and gets the answer: “A Methodist and a son of a bitch! … Keep riding!” I was particularly tickled with the floury speech of the stock trader near the beginning:.
“The killer has flown to the Territory and is now on the scout there.”
“This is what I heard.”
“He will find plenty of his own stamp there,” said he. “Birds of a feather. It is a sink of crime. Not a day goes by but there comes some new report of a farmer bludgeoned, a wife outraged, or a blameless traveler set upon and cut down in a sanguinary ambuscade. The civilizing arts of commerce do not flourish there.”
At the end of the 2004 edition of this 1968 book, Donna Tartt explains why it is a masterpiece for her and four generations of her family:
Mattie’s narrative tone is naive, didactic, hardheaded, and completely lacking in self-consciousness—and, at times unintentionally hilarious … A great part of True Grit’s charm is in Mattie’s blasé view of frontier America. Shootings, stabbings, and public hangings are recounted frankly and flatly, and often with rather less warmth than the political and personal opinions upon which Mattie digresses. She quotes scripture; she explains and gives advice to the reader; her observations are often overlaid with a decorative glaze of Sunday School piety. And her own very distinctive voice (blunt, unsentimental, yet salted with parlor platitudes) echoes throughout the reported speech of all the other characters—lawmen and outlaws alike—to richly comic effect.
May 2, 2017
"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. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band."
So begins Charles Portis’ 1968 novel, True Grit. Mattie Ross, now a forty-year-old spinster, narrates the events that surrounded her quest to find and punish her father’s killer. The opening passage demonstrates the deadpan quality of her narration as well as the detail in which she recounts her single-minded determination to achieve her goal no matter the obstacles that she will have to fight to overcome.
Chaney, after killing her father, fled to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and joined up with the “Lucky” Ned Pepper gang. Mattie realizes that she can’t travel alone into that treacherous territory and achieve her goal of bringing Chaney back to Fort Smith to stand trial in Judge Isaac Parker’s federal court for the Western District of Arkansas. That court also has jurisdiction over any case in the territory that involves a white person who is either a victim or perpetrator. Therefore, because the territory comes under federal jurisdiction, she sets out to hire the district’s meanest, toughest, orneriest U.S. deputy marshal to assist her.
She seeks advice on this matter from the local sheriff:
“'Who is the best marshal they have?'”
“The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, ‘I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cast for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.’”
“I said, ‘Where can I find this Rooster?’”
Mattie isn’t looking for a good tracker, or a fair man, she is looking for a man with “true grit,” a characteristic that she admires and that which she personally possesses in full measure. It turns out that Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn is a one-eyed, hard-drinking, ruthless, fat man of about forty who isn’t sure that he wants to work for Mattie, or, as he makes plain, any woman. But after much verbal sparring between the two, Rooster’s reticence is overcome by Mattie’s agreement to pay him the hundred dollars he demands for taking on the job. It is more than she wants to pay, but she compromises by promising to pay him fifty now and the other fifty after the mission is accomplished.
Matters become even more complicated when a Texas Ranger by the name of LaBoeuf (pronounced La-Beef) arrives in Fort Smith. He is also on Chaney’s trail. It seems that Chaney killed a state senator in Texas and that there is a sizable bounty on his head. The marshal and the ranger decide to join forces and split the proceeds if they are able to capture – or kill – the fugitive.
“Anyhow, it sounds queer. Five hundred dollars is mighty little for a man that killed a senator.”
“Bibbs was a little senator,” said LaBoeuf. “They would not have put up anything except it would look bad.”
Neither of the lawmen wants a fourteen-year-old girl to tag along and they attempt to leave her behind, but they don’t know Mattie. She will not be denied. The three, at odds with each other, and with differing goals, ride into the territory in search of Tom Chaney.
Even if you have watched one or both of the movies based on the book, both of which are good adaptations, the book is still an enjoyable read. It is unfortunate that the two successful movies have had the effect of shoving the book below the reading public’s radar screen. However, the publisher did re-issue the book as a tie-in with the later movie and therefore it is back in print and is no longer hard to locate.
Novelist Donna Tartt, writing in the introduction to the new edition, calls the book a masterpiece. She writes that four generations of her family, beginning with her great grandmother, deeply admired the novel. Her great grandmother was in her eighties when she first read it and introduced it to the other females in the family: her middle-aged grandmother; her twenty-something mother; and to her, who was ten when she first read it.
She does not mention any male members of her family being enamored with the book, and it is easy to see how this independent, bold, courageous, and yes, self-righteous and unaware young heroine would resonate with her and her female relatives. Mattie is the star of the story, but she is ably assisted by Rooster and LaBeouf and there are enough thrills and adventures to appeal to readers regardless of gender or age.
One of the book’s many qualities is that it can be read on more than one level. It can be approached as a coming-of-age story, or an adventure story, or a satire, or a story of redemption and loss of innocence, for it contains all these elements. As Michael Cleary wrote in Twentieth Century Western Writers, “True Grit is … a curious amalgam of parody, formula, and myth.” Cleary points out that Rooster, motivated by greed rather than justice, violates almost all perceptions of a Western hero. “Portis overlays realism on the romantic world of the West. [Therefore,] Rooster is not burdened by the moral introspection of a Virginian or Shane.”
But Rooster meets his match when he tries to get the best of Mattie Ross. Here we have two people who are willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals. But more times than not, it is Mattie who prevails. Mattie is not only smart and stubborn, she believes that others should carry out her wishes. Why? Well, because her self-assurance tells her without reservation that it is the right thing to do.
Part of the appeal of the novel is that Mattie’s narration contains much deadpan humor. However, she doesn’t know that. She is unaware of how she sounds and, anyway, she wouldn’t care even if she did.
Here are a couple examples of her unintentional humor:
“On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.”
“You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.”
Portis was born and raised in southern Arkansas, was educated at the University of Arkansas, and has lived most of his life in the state. That background allows him in True Grit to demonstrate his deep understanding of the people, place, and language of the time. In a profile of Portis in the New York Times, Charles McGrath writes, Portis “doesn’t use e-mail, has an unlisted phone number, declines interview requests … and shuns photographs with the ardor of a fugitive in the witness protection program.” Maybe that reluctance stems from the many years he spent as a reporter prior to becoming a full-time novelist and is aware of how interviewers sometimes misquote or misconstrue or otherwise distort the interviewee’s remarks.
Portis is the author of five novels. True Grit was his second. The first was Norwood (1966), filmed after True Grit, it flopped at the box office. The other three are The Dog of the South(1979), Masters of Atlantis (1989), and Gringos (1991).
So begins Charles Portis’ 1968 novel, True Grit. Mattie Ross, now a forty-year-old spinster, narrates the events that surrounded her quest to find and punish her father’s killer. The opening passage demonstrates the deadpan quality of her narration as well as the detail in which she recounts her single-minded determination to achieve her goal no matter the obstacles that she will have to fight to overcome.
Chaney, after killing her father, fled to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) and joined up with the “Lucky” Ned Pepper gang. Mattie realizes that she can’t travel alone into that treacherous territory and achieve her goal of bringing Chaney back to Fort Smith to stand trial in Judge Isaac Parker’s federal court for the Western District of Arkansas. That court also has jurisdiction over any case in the territory that involves a white person who is either a victim or perpetrator. Therefore, because the territory comes under federal jurisdiction, she sets out to hire the district’s meanest, toughest, orneriest U.S. deputy marshal to assist her.
She seeks advice on this matter from the local sheriff:
“'Who is the best marshal they have?'”
“The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, ‘I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cast for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.’”
“I said, ‘Where can I find this Rooster?’”
Mattie isn’t looking for a good tracker, or a fair man, she is looking for a man with “true grit,” a characteristic that she admires and that which she personally possesses in full measure. It turns out that Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn is a one-eyed, hard-drinking, ruthless, fat man of about forty who isn’t sure that he wants to work for Mattie, or, as he makes plain, any woman. But after much verbal sparring between the two, Rooster’s reticence is overcome by Mattie’s agreement to pay him the hundred dollars he demands for taking on the job. It is more than she wants to pay, but she compromises by promising to pay him fifty now and the other fifty after the mission is accomplished.
Matters become even more complicated when a Texas Ranger by the name of LaBoeuf (pronounced La-Beef) arrives in Fort Smith. He is also on Chaney’s trail. It seems that Chaney killed a state senator in Texas and that there is a sizable bounty on his head. The marshal and the ranger decide to join forces and split the proceeds if they are able to capture – or kill – the fugitive.
“Anyhow, it sounds queer. Five hundred dollars is mighty little for a man that killed a senator.”
“Bibbs was a little senator,” said LaBoeuf. “They would not have put up anything except it would look bad.”
Neither of the lawmen wants a fourteen-year-old girl to tag along and they attempt to leave her behind, but they don’t know Mattie. She will not be denied. The three, at odds with each other, and with differing goals, ride into the territory in search of Tom Chaney.
Even if you have watched one or both of the movies based on the book, both of which are good adaptations, the book is still an enjoyable read. It is unfortunate that the two successful movies have had the effect of shoving the book below the reading public’s radar screen. However, the publisher did re-issue the book as a tie-in with the later movie and therefore it is back in print and is no longer hard to locate.
Novelist Donna Tartt, writing in the introduction to the new edition, calls the book a masterpiece. She writes that four generations of her family, beginning with her great grandmother, deeply admired the novel. Her great grandmother was in her eighties when she first read it and introduced it to the other females in the family: her middle-aged grandmother; her twenty-something mother; and to her, who was ten when she first read it.
She does not mention any male members of her family being enamored with the book, and it is easy to see how this independent, bold, courageous, and yes, self-righteous and unaware young heroine would resonate with her and her female relatives. Mattie is the star of the story, but she is ably assisted by Rooster and LaBeouf and there are enough thrills and adventures to appeal to readers regardless of gender or age.
One of the book’s many qualities is that it can be read on more than one level. It can be approached as a coming-of-age story, or an adventure story, or a satire, or a story of redemption and loss of innocence, for it contains all these elements. As Michael Cleary wrote in Twentieth Century Western Writers, “True Grit is … a curious amalgam of parody, formula, and myth.” Cleary points out that Rooster, motivated by greed rather than justice, violates almost all perceptions of a Western hero. “Portis overlays realism on the romantic world of the West. [Therefore,] Rooster is not burdened by the moral introspection of a Virginian or Shane.”
But Rooster meets his match when he tries to get the best of Mattie Ross. Here we have two people who are willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals. But more times than not, it is Mattie who prevails. Mattie is not only smart and stubborn, she believes that others should carry out her wishes. Why? Well, because her self-assurance tells her without reservation that it is the right thing to do.
Part of the appeal of the novel is that Mattie’s narration contains much deadpan humor. However, she doesn’t know that. She is unaware of how she sounds and, anyway, she wouldn’t care even if she did.
Here are a couple examples of her unintentional humor:
“On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need for some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.”
“You can expect that out of Federal people and to make it worse this was a Republican gang that cared nothing for the opinion of the good people of Arkansas who are Democrats.”
Portis was born and raised in southern Arkansas, was educated at the University of Arkansas, and has lived most of his life in the state. That background allows him in True Grit to demonstrate his deep understanding of the people, place, and language of the time. In a profile of Portis in the New York Times, Charles McGrath writes, Portis “doesn’t use e-mail, has an unlisted phone number, declines interview requests … and shuns photographs with the ardor of a fugitive in the witness protection program.” Maybe that reluctance stems from the many years he spent as a reporter prior to becoming a full-time novelist and is aware of how interviewers sometimes misquote or misconstrue or otherwise distort the interviewee’s remarks.
Portis is the author of five novels. True Grit was his second. The first was Norwood (1966), filmed after True Grit, it flopped at the box office. The other three are The Dog of the South(1979), Masters of Atlantis (1989), and Gringos (1991).
February 29, 2020
Check out my review for this fantastic book on Grimdark Magazine at: Grimdark Magazine
***
So sad to hear the news. R.I.P. Charles Portis.
***
True Grit is a spectacular western that is full of heart with genuinely delightful characters that you instantly connect with. Charles Portis has created a wonderful tale of the west that will go down in my all time favourites.
“Fill your hand you son of a bitch!”
True Grit follows a young girl full of ‘grit’, setting out to bring her father’s murderer to justice. Mattie Ross in the year 1878 is searching for Tom Chaney, the man who worked for her father then shot him. Mattie is 14 years old but is a fantastic character with as much gravitas as quippy remarks. She is straight to the point and one tough girl who does not messagings round and will not rest until Tom Chaney has either been shot by her dragoon pistol or hung from the noose.
Mattie searches for a U.S. Marshall to assist her with the capture of Tom Chaney and eventually finds one in the rugged and experienced Rooster Cogburn, a Marshall who is known more for how many outlaws he has put bullets into rather than delivered alive. Cogburn’s relationship with Mattie is instantly enjoyable and they have some fantastic dialogue, Cogburn’s no-nonsense approach almost a match for Mattie’s hardy outlook. Once Mattie hires her whiskey-loving Marhsall she meets another man on Chaney’s trail - a Texas Ranger called Laboeuf. Laboeuf is of a different disposition to Mattie and Cogburn, with alternate plans for Chaney.
“Who is the best marshal they have?'
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'
I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”
In no time the three ride out on their quest to bring in the outlaw. I had never read a western before 2020, but this was my fourth and I just don’t know what it is about the genre but the writing is magical. There is a poetic and lyrical style to these stories, and especially in True Grit the dialogue is close to genius. It never feels overdone at all and the language is extremely compelling. It has an honesty to it that I have rarely found in other styles of storytelling.
Also, it has plenty of revolvers and six-shooters and repeating rifles and horse rides over the plain. True Grit is packed with everyone’s favourite and typical western components and feels extraordinarily realistic. The relationship between the three justice-seekers is well-done, the description and scene setting is beautiful and honest and the plot is simple but very fun to read.
“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
It is a short story at just over 230 pages long, I was able to read it in an evening. It is easy going and natural and I can see this being a feel-good read of mine for many years to come. If you’ve seen the film(s) of True Grit you’ll soon see that they are extremely faithful to the book. No wonder the films were so good if they had some awesome material to use. Both John Wayne and Jeff Bridges are sublime as Rooster Cogburn.
“That's bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”
5/5 - A superb story of justice, the resilience of a 14-year-old girl and cowboy classics. SO easy to read and so easy to enjoy, I would recommend this to everyone who reads! Cowboy hats off to Charles Portis.
***
So sad to hear the news. R.I.P. Charles Portis.
***
True Grit is a spectacular western that is full of heart with genuinely delightful characters that you instantly connect with. Charles Portis has created a wonderful tale of the west that will go down in my all time favourites.
“Fill your hand you son of a bitch!”
True Grit follows a young girl full of ‘grit’, setting out to bring her father’s murderer to justice. Mattie Ross in the year 1878 is searching for Tom Chaney, the man who worked for her father then shot him. Mattie is 14 years old but is a fantastic character with as much gravitas as quippy remarks. She is straight to the point and one tough girl who does not messagings round and will not rest until Tom Chaney has either been shot by her dragoon pistol or hung from the noose.
Mattie searches for a U.S. Marshall to assist her with the capture of Tom Chaney and eventually finds one in the rugged and experienced Rooster Cogburn, a Marshall who is known more for how many outlaws he has put bullets into rather than delivered alive. Cogburn’s relationship with Mattie is instantly enjoyable and they have some fantastic dialogue, Cogburn’s no-nonsense approach almost a match for Mattie’s hardy outlook. Once Mattie hires her whiskey-loving Marhsall she meets another man on Chaney’s trail - a Texas Ranger called Laboeuf. Laboeuf is of a different disposition to Mattie and Cogburn, with alternate plans for Chaney.
“Who is the best marshal they have?'
The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, 'I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have.'
I said, 'Where can I find this Rooster?”
In no time the three ride out on their quest to bring in the outlaw. I had never read a western before 2020, but this was my fourth and I just don’t know what it is about the genre but the writing is magical. There is a poetic and lyrical style to these stories, and especially in True Grit the dialogue is close to genius. It never feels overdone at all and the language is extremely compelling. It has an honesty to it that I have rarely found in other styles of storytelling.
Also, it has plenty of revolvers and six-shooters and repeating rifles and horse rides over the plain. True Grit is packed with everyone’s favourite and typical western components and feels extraordinarily realistic. The relationship between the three justice-seekers is well-done, the description and scene setting is beautiful and honest and the plot is simple but very fun to read.
“You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free except the Grace of God. You cannot earn that or deserve it.”
It is a short story at just over 230 pages long, I was able to read it in an evening. It is easy going and natural and I can see this being a feel-good read of mine for many years to come. If you’ve seen the film(s) of True Grit you’ll soon see that they are extremely faithful to the book. No wonder the films were so good if they had some awesome material to use. Both John Wayne and Jeff Bridges are sublime as Rooster Cogburn.
“That's bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”
5/5 - A superb story of justice, the resilience of a 14-year-old girl and cowboy classics. SO easy to read and so easy to enjoy, I would recommend this to everyone who reads! Cowboy hats off to Charles Portis.
August 21, 2015
I have always loved the old True Grit movie with John Wayne, and now I can say I love the novel too!
This entertaining 1870's Wild West adventure begins when a formidable and funny 14 year old Mattie Ross hires the fat and fearless one-eyed Sheriff Rooster Cogburn to track down outlaw Tom Chaney who gunned down her beloved father in cold blood. With the assistance of a Texas Ranger and repeated threats of retaliation from Mattie's relentless lawyer Daggett for anyone who gets in her way, the contrary group embark on their journey.
Filled with many laughable and unforgettable one-liners, this delightful western classic will always be a favorite in my book! Highly recommend!
February 28, 2020
I have long meant to read this novel, and it is sad that the thing that finally got me to it was the death of the author. We lost Charles Portis on February 17, 2020. Sadder even than his death was knowing that he had suffered from Alzheimers for six years prior. Such a vicious disease that robs its victims of their very identity.
Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle in Yell County is one of the most memorable characters in Western literature. She is surrounded by other unforgettables, Rooster Cogburn and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf among them, but she is the heart and soul of this novel and while she is looking for true grit in a man to chase down her father’s killer, she is the person with true grit in this novel and that is unmistakable.
It is a fast-paced novel that I swept through in one day. Of course, knowing the story beforehand is a double-edged sword, it makes the reading flow but it takes the surprise out of coming events. One of the things I dearly prized was Charles Portis’ sense of humor that is peppered throughout the book and made me chuckle aloud a time or two.
Describing the sitting judge in Fort Smith: On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.
Or wrangling with Mr. Stonehill, who gets the worst end of Mattie’s sharpness and persistence.
”Lawyer Daggett is the man who forced them into receivership,” said I. “They tried to ‘mess’ with him. It was a feather in his cap. He is on familiar terms with important men in Little Rock. The talk is he will be governor one day.” “Then he is a man of little ambition,” said Stonehill, “incommensurate with his capacity for making mischief.”
I have seen both movie versions of True Grit and enjoyed them equally. A great movie based on a great book. Well done, Mr. Portis.
Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle in Yell County is one of the most memorable characters in Western literature. She is surrounded by other unforgettables, Rooster Cogburn and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf among them, but she is the heart and soul of this novel and while she is looking for true grit in a man to chase down her father’s killer, she is the person with true grit in this novel and that is unmistakable.
It is a fast-paced novel that I swept through in one day. Of course, knowing the story beforehand is a double-edged sword, it makes the reading flow but it takes the surprise out of coming events. One of the things I dearly prized was Charles Portis’ sense of humor that is peppered throughout the book and made me chuckle aloud a time or two.
Describing the sitting judge in Fort Smith: On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic. That was his wife’s religion. It was his own business and none of mine. If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.
Or wrangling with Mr. Stonehill, who gets the worst end of Mattie’s sharpness and persistence.
”Lawyer Daggett is the man who forced them into receivership,” said I. “They tried to ‘mess’ with him. It was a feather in his cap. He is on familiar terms with important men in Little Rock. The talk is he will be governor one day.” “Then he is a man of little ambition,” said Stonehill, “incommensurate with his capacity for making mischief.”
I have seen both movie versions of True Grit and enjoyed them equally. A great movie based on a great book. Well done, Mr. Portis.
April 5, 2024
If I had ever entertained the idea of giving this book 4 stars, the ending wiped that thought clear outta my head. That extraordinary, no-he-didn't, catch-my-breath, what-NOW ending. It's been a while since my kids have turned to me quizzically while I was reading, because I was audibly freaking out. (Charles Portis' writing is superb, but I think it was the snakes that put me over the edge.)
So, five stars it is.
True Grit had me hooked from the first... and it was all about VOICE. The voice of Mattie Ross, a 14 year old girl in the wild west days of bandits and U.S. Marshalls on horseback, who, grittiest of all, and against all odds, was out to capture her father's murderer.
That voice of hers, so distinctively deadpan, so Old Testament tough, so unintentionally amusing. She tells this adventure in a way that pulls you in and has you rooting for her instantly.
In Donna Tartt's afterword, she mentions how she can't think of another book that is so appealing to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes. I completely get why this is true. If you're a reader of lit fic, you'll love this because of the voice, humour and use of southern dialect. But you'll be equally happy if you're a fan of westerns or just plain old action plots. There's also something sweet to be found here, under all the dust and guns and snakes. Something that looks like friendship, or admiration, or chivalry, or heroism. It's nicely hidden under the guns and snakes, though, thank goodness. This isn't a sentimental tale, but there's definitely heart in it.
There are tough guys in this book a plenty, but Mattie Ross is the one to watch out for, and I was delighted by her all the way through.
So, five stars it is.
True Grit had me hooked from the first... and it was all about VOICE. The voice of Mattie Ross, a 14 year old girl in the wild west days of bandits and U.S. Marshalls on horseback, who, grittiest of all, and against all odds, was out to capture her father's murderer.
That voice of hers, so distinctively deadpan, so Old Testament tough, so unintentionally amusing. She tells this adventure in a way that pulls you in and has you rooting for her instantly.
In Donna Tartt's afterword, she mentions how she can't think of another book that is so appealing to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes. I completely get why this is true. If you're a reader of lit fic, you'll love this because of the voice, humour and use of southern dialect. But you'll be equally happy if you're a fan of westerns or just plain old action plots. There's also something sweet to be found here, under all the dust and guns and snakes. Something that looks like friendship, or admiration, or chivalry, or heroism. It's nicely hidden under the guns and snakes, though, thank goodness. This isn't a sentimental tale, but there's definitely heart in it.
There are tough guys in this book a plenty, but Mattie Ross is the one to watch out for, and I was delighted by her all the way through.
December 11, 2016
My book is the 2010 reprint (with an afterward by Donna Tartt ) which coincided with the release of the the second True Grit movie directed by the Cohen Brothers and starring Jeff Bridges, but my memories of the story come straight from the great old John Wayne production in 1968, which most likely I watched on a black and white screen. Scrappy Mattie Ross is only 14 when she hires a beat up , mean , old one- eyed Marshall, Rooster Cogburn to help her avenge the robbery and death of her father by the cowardly Thomas Chaney, and then accompanies him into the wilderness of Indian territory to accomplish the task. Mattie's a girl with a lot of pluck who was hard to forget even after all these years. Glad I finally got around to reading this American Classic for the first time, even if it's getting close to 50 years later. 4 stars
October 5, 2021
I was tempted to add this to my western shelf, but I don't HAVE a western shelf, because I don't read westerns. But True Grit is a pleasant surprise, a dark horse, a little page turner that could.
Quite simply, it's a classic mix of an upright, stubborn, and principled young girl out to avenge the murder of her father in post-Civil War Arkansas. She teams up with Rooster Cogburn, a wily old ask-no-questions marshal who brings them in more dead than alive, and a younger Texan dude named LaBoeuf (pronounced La-Beef). The mix produces humor, terrific dialogue, and, of course, the adventure you'd expect in lawmen with a 14-yr-old chasing down posses of bad guys.
But really, what makes this book work is voice. Mattie Ross's narration is wonderful to behold, as are the expressions of her day. The dialect is not as difficult as Twain's Huckleberry Finn, but comparisons are otherwise justified. It's a no-brainer for Twain fans to become Portis fans.
I pulled this off of my classroom library shelf before skedaddling in late June. Glad I did. As for the classroom itself, it must be understood that, as with Twain, there are a few (MUCH fewer) un-PC references to blacks in the early section of the book, but the one black character (as with Twain again) is as positive as certain ions. Some "filler" parts in the traveling avengers chat-fest, but overall, high marks. And, as the afterword attests, this is Donna Tartt's favorite book.
Also of note: I have never seen the John Wayne movie of this book, so I've no clue if that would affect my reading either way.
Quite simply, it's a classic mix of an upright, stubborn, and principled young girl out to avenge the murder of her father in post-Civil War Arkansas. She teams up with Rooster Cogburn, a wily old ask-no-questions marshal who brings them in more dead than alive, and a younger Texan dude named LaBoeuf (pronounced La-Beef). The mix produces humor, terrific dialogue, and, of course, the adventure you'd expect in lawmen with a 14-yr-old chasing down posses of bad guys.
But really, what makes this book work is voice. Mattie Ross's narration is wonderful to behold, as are the expressions of her day. The dialect is not as difficult as Twain's Huckleberry Finn, but comparisons are otherwise justified. It's a no-brainer for Twain fans to become Portis fans.
I pulled this off of my classroom library shelf before skedaddling in late June. Glad I did. As for the classroom itself, it must be understood that, as with Twain, there are a few (MUCH fewer) un-PC references to blacks in the early section of the book, but the one black character (as with Twain again) is as positive as certain ions. Some "filler" parts in the traveling avengers chat-fest, but overall, high marks. And, as the afterword attests, this is Donna Tartt's favorite book.
Also of note: I have never seen the John Wayne movie of this book, so I've no clue if that would affect my reading either way.
July 2, 2024
Чудесен уестърн, много ми харесаха чувството за хумор и стилът на писане на автора!
Този жанр определено има какво да даде на читателя, но е някак системно пренебрегван от нашите издатели...
И тримата главни герои в разказа - Мати, шериф Когбърн и тексаския рейнджър Лабийф са изградени превъзходно, а приключенията им са предадени достоверно. Това е едно задъхано и кърваво преследване през индианските територии, в търсене на мъст за непровокирано убийство! Точно каквото ми се четеше в момента.
Има и добър филм от 2010 година, с Джеф Бриджис и Мат Деймън в главните роли.
Грозноватата корица избрана от издателството е просто покъртителна - не знам от къде биха се взели тези кактуси в Арканзас и Оклахома?
P.S. Ще потърся на английски и други романи от мистър Портис.
Този жанр определено има какво да даде на читателя, но е някак системно пренебрегван от нашите издатели...
И тримата главни герои в разказа - Мати, шериф Когбърн и тексаския рейнджър Лабийф са изградени превъзходно, а приключенията им са предадени достоверно. Това е едно задъхано и кърваво преследване през индианските територии, в търсене на мъст за непровокирано убийство! Точно каквото ми се четеше в момента.
Има и добър филм от 2010 година, с Джеф Бриджис и Мат Деймън в главните роли.
Грозноватата корица избрана от издателството е просто покъртителна - не знам от къде биха се взели тези кактуси в Арканзас и Оклахома?
P.S. Ще потърся на английски и други романи от мистър Портис.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 7,517 reviews