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romanticized in some quarters as an outlaw chieftain a la Alexandre Dumas, the massacre he led at the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, is considered the worst atrocity of the American civil war, and history has tended to view Quantrill as a cold-blooded killer. One man—shot five times when he tried to surrender—was left for dead by his assailant with the parting advice: “Tell old God that the last man you saw on earth was Quantrill.” Rooster, presumably, has come by some of his famous meanness under Quantrill’s tutelage; the incident with Odus Wharton and the bodies in the fire does seem to have some parallels with unpleasant incidents in historical accounts of raids at Lawrence and Centralia; and certainly he has picked up Quantrill’s reputed habit of riding against his enemy with the reins of his horse between his teeth and a revolver in each hand. And yet it is scoundrelly old Rooster who—like Huck Finn, revolting instinctively against the accepted brutality of his day—rises unexpectedly to True Grit’s moments of justice and nobility. He does this in a number of minor comical respects (as in his satisfying encounter with the two “wicked boys” who are tormenting the mule on the riverbank) not to mention the novel’s extraordinary climax. But perhaps the most gratifying moment in the entire book is when Rooster is jolted from his ambivalence about Mattie by the sight of LaBoeuf falling upon her with a switch:

I began to cry, I could not help it, but more from anger and embarrassment than pain. I said to Rooster, “Are you going to let him do this?”

He dropped his cigarette to the ground and said, “No, I don’t believe I will. Put your switch away, LaBoeuf. She has got the best of us.”

“She has not got the best of me,” replied the Ranger.

Rooster said, “That will do, I said.”

LaBoeuf paid him no heed.

Rooster raised his voice and said, “Put that switch down, LaBoeuf! Do you hear me talking to you?”

LaBoeuf stopped and looked at him. Then he said, “I am going ahead with what I started.”

Rooster pulled his cedar-handled revolver and cocked it with his thumb and threw down on LaBoeuf. He said, “It will be the biggest mistake you ever made, you Texas brush-popper.”

True Grit, in short, begins where chivalry meets the frontier—where the old Confederacy starts to merge and shade away into the Wild West. And without giving anything away, I can say that the book ends at a travelling Wild West show in Memphis in the early 1900s: which is to say, at once in the twentieth century and firmly enshrined in myth and legend.

True Grit was first published in 1968. When it came out, Roald Dahl wrote that it was the best novel to come his way in a long time. “I was going to say it was the best novel to come my way since . . . Then I stopped. Since what? What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty?” Certainly when I was growing up in the 1970s, True Grit was widely thought to be a classic; when I was about fourteen years old, it was read along with Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe in the Honors English classes at my school. Yet (because, I believe, of the John Wayne film, which is good enough but which doesn’t do the book justice), True Grit vanished from the public eye, and my mother and I, along with many other Portis fans, were reduced to scouring used bookstores and buying up whatever stock we could find because the copies we lent out so evangelically were never returned. (In one particularly dark moment, when my mother’s last copy had disappeared and a new one was nowhere to be had, she borrowed the library’s copy and then pretended that she had lost it). Now—thankfully—the book is back in print, and I am delighted to have the honor of introducing Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn to a new generation of readers.

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