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Called “the original laconic cutup,” “True Grit” author Charles Portis was one of the country’s most revered novelists, but lived a secluded life in his later years

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
FEB. 17, 2020 1:02 PM
NEW YORK — Novelist Charles Portis, a favorite among critics and writers for such shaggy dog stories as “Norwood” and “Gringos” and a bounty for Hollywood whose droll, bloody western “True Grit” was a bestseller twice adapted into Oscar-nominated films, died Monday at age 86.
Portis, a former newspaper reporter who apparently learned enough to swear off talking to the media, had been suffering from Alzheimer’s in recent years. His brother, Jonathan Portis, told the Associated Press that he died in a hospice in Little Rock, Ark., his longtime residence.

Charles Portis was among the most admired authors to nearly vanish from public consciousness in his own lifetime. His fans included Tom Wolfe, Roy Blount Jr. and Larry McMurtry, and he was often compared to Mark Twain for his plainspoken humor and wry perspective. Portis saw the world from the ground up, from bars and shacks and trailer homes, and few spun wilder and funnier stories. In a Portis novel, usually set in the South and south of the border, characters embarked on journeys that took the most unpredictable detours.

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Charles Portis, the publicity-shy author of “True Grit” and a short list of other novels that drew a cult following and accolades as the work of possibly the nation’s best unknown writer, died on Monday at a hospice in Little Rock, Ark. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by his brother Jonathan, who said Mr. Portis had been in hospice care for two years and in an Alzheimer’s care facility for six years prior.

Mr. Portis was in his early 30s and well established as a reporter at The New York Herald Tribune in 1964, when he decided to turn to fiction full time. The decision astonished his friends and colleagues at the paper, among them Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron.

He had covered the civil rights movement in the South: riots in Birmingham, Ala.; the jailing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Ga.; Gov. George C. Wallace’s attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama. And he had been assigned to a coveted post, London bureau chief. His future in journalism was bright.

But he said he was heading home; he was going to move into an Arkansas fishing shack and write novels.

“A fishing shack!” Mr. Wolfe recalled in his book “The New Journalism.” “In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.”

Within two years Mr. Portis had published his first novel, “Norwood.” It told the story of Norwood Pratt, a naïve ex-Marine from East Texas on a road trip to collect a $70 debt. Along the way he encounters, among other things, a con artist and a chicken that can play tick-tack-toe.

“Norwood” set the pattern for Mr. Portis’s use of misfits, cranks and sly humor in his fiction.

Two years later came “True Grit,” a best seller and his biggest success. A tale of the Wild West, it revolves around the grizzled, irascible federal marshal Rooster Cogburn, “an old one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of Grover Cleveland.”