True Grit - Charles Portis [0]
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
AFTERWORD
TRUE PRAISE FOR TRUE GRIT
“True Grit is when you are a 14-year-old girl from Yell County, Arkansas, and you’ve just shot a dangerous outlaw and the gun’s recoil has sent you backward into a pit, and you are wedged in the pit and sinking fast into the cave below where bats are brushing against your legs, and you reach out for something to hold on to and find a rotting corpse beside you and it’s full of angry rattlers, and then it turns out you didn’t kill the outlaw, he’s up at the rim of the pit laughing at you, about to shoot you—and you don’t lose your nerve. That’s True Grit.”
—ELIOT FREMONT-SMITH, The New York Times
“Charles Portis is perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America.”
—RON ROSENBAUM, Esquire
“As entertaining and original as any fiction of recent times.”
—St. Louis Dispatch
“One of those rare secret delights . . . one can recommend to inveterate fiction readers and to those who read only one or two novels a year.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Wonderful . . . a thoroughly engaging—indeed a gripping—book and should be enjoyed by people of all ages.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“It’s delightful, everything struck me as just right, from the marvelous title and the bull’s-eye opening sentence clear through to the last spunky paragraph.”
—IRA LEVIN, author of Rosemary’s Baby
“A beautiful, funny, gripping story . . . True Grit is true genius.”
—DICK SCHAAP, Book Week
“As delightful to a twelve-year-old as to a cultivated adult, True Grit is uproarious high adventure . . . wooly and credible as Bonnie and Clyde . . . a yarn with swagger, color, and song.”
—Saturday Review
“True Grit is enthralling.”
—RICHARD CONDON, author of The Manchurian Candidate
“It is a pleasure to be able to recommend a novel wholeheartedly regardless of age, sex, class, color, or country of origin . . . an instant classic . . . read it and have the most fun you’ve had in years, maybe decades.”
—VIRGINIA PASLEY, Newsday
“True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? I do not know . . . What a writer!”
—ROALD DAHL
“It is a delight. Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle, Arkansas, is here to stay, like Huck Finn.”
—WALKER PERCY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
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Gringos
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
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Copyright © 1968 by Charles Portis Afterword © 2004 by Donna Tartt
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Published by arrangement with Simon & Schuster, Inc.
True Grit appeared in a somewhat different version
in the Saturday Evening Post.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Portis, Charles.
True grit : a novel / by Charles Portis.
p. cm.
1. Teenage girls—Fiction. 2. Fathers—Death—Fiction. 3. United States
marshals—Fiction. 4. Outlaws—Fiction. 5. Revenge—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.O663 T’.54—dc21 2002034552
Type formatting by Bernard Schleifer
eISBN : 978-1-590-20650-8
http://us.penguingroup.com
For my mother and father
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