Charles Portis: Collected Works (LOA #369): Norwood / True Grit / The Dog of the South / Masters of Atlantis / Gringos / Stories & Other Writings

by Charles Portis, Jay Jennings (Editor)

The ultimate for the first time in one collector's volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True Grit

Summer reading recommendation in THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, and THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

"Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." —Ron Rosenbaum

"Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man , Charles Portis’s True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice." —Jonathan Lethem

"No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does." —Donna Tartt

"His fiction is the funniest I know." —Roy Blount, Jr.

Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz , Alice in Wonderland , and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .

Portis's deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit , the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy.

A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. “no one should die without having read,” The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.)

Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting.

Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the “bravest dog in all Mexico.”

A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis's skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in “The Forgotten River”; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection “Combinations of Jacksons.”

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Short Stories, Novels, 20th Century, Westerns

1096 pages, Hardcover

Published April 4, 2023

About the author

Charles 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.

Reviews

[Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a gift, and I expected that I wouldn't enjoy it very much. I don't have much patience for a lot of twentieth-century, white, male, American authors; I'm deeply disinterested in the kind of masculinity Hemingway is peddling, for example. As a Southerner, I'm also really weary of nostalgia/apologia for a South I don't miss at all, and I expected Portis to deliver on both those scores.

I'm happy to say that I was very wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and Portis has become one of my favorite novelists. Contrary to my expectations, one of Portis's main projects over his body of work is to subvert stereotypical ideas of masculinity in really surprising ways. For example, in Norwood, the protagonist is this sweetly goofy guy who bumbles cluelessly through life being kind and generous to everyone around him and being taken in by con men but who manages to come out all right in the end. In True Grit, the character with true grit is a 14 year old girl, and the two men in the book are a drunken sad sack and a braggart. Dog of the South features a protagonist who makes confident pronouncements that are stupidly, obviously wrong and who gets hung up on irrelevant minutiae but who is confidently assured of his intellectual superiority.

Portis is also incredibly funny, just laugh-out-loud funny. Masters of Atlantis is a satire about a guy who inadvertently starts a cult. The whole thing is a con, but he's a total believer. It's very funny, but also very prescient commentary about the way conspiracy theories work.

I think my favorite is Gringos. This novel is the most realistic of the bunch and the darkest. It's still funny, but not in a satirical or absurdist way like the others (well, True Grit is not very funny). I don't want to spoil the plot, but I will say it involves debunking ancient astronaut theorists.

[Elizabeth]

I don't just want to read it, I want to own it. How I love this man.

[Mike Mikulski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Portis has a true American voice, drawn from the South without the gothic luggage of Faulkner, O'Connor and others. Portis chooses to take the viewpoint of an observer with a wry sense of humor similar to Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson.

Norwood, Portis' first novel, follows the path of Norwood Pratt, a 26 year old 1950's Marine vet called home to Texas to care for his mourning, recently-widowed sister. His sister quickly escapes her sorrow and marries a northern, know-everything boyfriend. Norwood escapes his now over crowded house and embarks on a Texarkana to New York City road trip to find a Marine buddy who owes him $70. The tale moves quickly to the road with a vivid picture of mid-modern America. I never knew Norwood was made into a movie in the 1970's starring Glenn Campbell as Norwood, Kim Darby as Norwood's road companion Rita Lee Chapman, Joe Namath as the Marine buddy and Dom Deluise as Norwood's new annoying brother in-law. Campbell and Darby are carry-overs from 1969's True Grit.

True Grit is a masterpiece western that immediately jumps into action as 14-year old Mattie Ross describes the murder of her father at the hands of Tom Chaney. In first person narration, Mattie has the voice of a wise beyond her years young girl, describing the hire of US Marshall Rooster Cogburn to track down Chaney. Joined by the Texas Ranger fugitive hunter LaBouef, the three form a posse on an early winter pursuit through the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas and Oklahoma. The novel is vibrant and fast moving.

The Dog of the South is a road farce following another 26 year old, Raymond Midge, as he leaves to track down his runaway wife who has left with his fellow newspaper writer Guy Dupree in Midge's beloved Ford Torino. Another road story, Midge drives from Texarkana through Mexico to British Honduras. The characters met on this journey are true originals. The characters Portis creates, including Midge himself, parody writers, the overly educated, get-rich schemers, Christian missionaries and eccentric crazies on this journey.

Gringos, Portis' last novel, depicts a group of American ex-pats living in Merida, Mexico in a style similar to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Another parody, Portis takes on late 1960's hippies and academia. The academics and hippies are all fascinated with Mayan culture and artifacts all for different reasons, monetary value of the artifacts, personal academic glory, fascination with ancient astronauts and belief in Mayan end times. Gringos is told through the eyes of former marine Jim Burns who himself was a one time scavenger and reseller of Mayan artifacts.

Portis's journalism is in the early 60's new journalism style and shines light on the civil rights struggle in the south and all of its violence, the rise of the Nashville music scene and a 1000 mile road journey through Baja Mexico. All great stuff. Portis' one piece of work that was published in the New Yorker is a short humor piece called Your Action Line and is literally laugh out loud funny.

The only disappointment in this collection is Master of Atlantis, another parody/satire mocking Masonic-style secret societies and cults. It is in the style of Sinclair Lewis's Babbit and Elmer Gantry. While well-written with well fleshed out characters like all of Portis's other work, the narrower focus of the parody wears out in a work I thought was over-long.

Overall this is a great collection that is well worth reading!

[Thaddeus Wert · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest American writers I've ever read. Laugh out loud funny, while also making serious points about how crazy our culture is.

[Laura Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Portis really is the undisputed king of the shaggy dog road trip story. It's like Americana that's been bottled up into so pure and undiluted an essence that it becomes absurd, convoluted, and wonderfully ridiculous. Clearly, True Grit is the standout of the bunch (mostly because it seems to have an actual directed plot -- who doesn't love a revenge tale? -- and a firecracker of a narrator in Mattie Ross, who is hands-down one of the best characters Portis ever wrote), but I'm actually somewhat partial to Masters of Atlantis, which is a wackadoo commentary on Freemasons, secret societies in general, get rich quick schemes, conspiracy theorists, inheritance laws, and the mid-century American surveillance state. World War I veteran Lamar Jimmerson accidentally becomes an initiate in the secret Gnomon Society, shares its secrets with British dandy and dilettante Sydney Hen (who ends up fomenting a schism between the Continental and American branches of Gnomonism), and founds a Temple of the order in Burnette, Indiana, which attracts various individuals of dubious distinction hoping to become adepts. I can't even begin to do justice to the bizarre, madcap mess of it all, but here's a little helping:

"The Gnomon wave was cresting, and it was at this high point that Morehead Moaler of Brownsville, Texas, became a Gnomon, perhaps the most steadfast of them all. But little notice was taken of him at the time, or of his remote Texas Pillar, what with all the national excitement. There were articles in the press about 'the mysterious Mr. Jimmerson' who remained concealed in his 'Egyptian Temple' in Burnette, Indiana, while his spokesman, Austin Popper, went about teaching 'a lost Egyptian science.' Look, the magazine, published an account of a Popper rally in Philadelphia, with a striking photograph of a roomful of men standing with their hands clasped atop their heads. Popper appeared on a network show in Chicago, a breakfast show, and was received with whistles and sustained applause from the friendly oldsters in the audience. He marched around the breakfast table with them, and one jolly old man, whose name he failed to catch in the hubbub, presented him with a talking blue jay. He caught the bird's name, Squanto, but just missed catching the name of the old gentleman, whose smiling red face he was to see often in his dreams, the face saying its name, but just out of earshot, never with quite enough force.
Mr. Jimmerson, at the urging of the Council, called Popper in off the road and said, 'This has gone too far, Austin. I want you stop playing the fool. I want you to show some dignity. They tell me you have a Victrola now and a talking bird.'
Popper was contrite. He promised to conduct himself with restraint in the future. Then he went back on the road and resumed his old ways. He led his followers in cheers and he played bouncy tunes on a windup phonograph, marking the beat with wildly swooping arms. He engaged in comic dialogues with Squanto. He continued to court the press and he even had his picture taken with politicians. These were two of the four P's that Gnomons were under orders to shun, the other two being the Pope and the police. He continued to weaken the membership requirements until admittance to the order became almost effortless. The two nights of initiation were reduced to a token twenty minutes, with no insistence on figs, and the Pledge was no longer eight densely printed pages of Hermetical mystery lore and bloody vows of faith to the Ten Pillars of Atlantis--all to be recited without stumbling once--but rather one short paragraph that was little more than a bland affirmation of humility before the unseen powers of the universe."

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Portis On Independence Day

Every Fourth of July, I try to review a book appropriate to the themes of the day. For this difficult year, 2024, I picked this Library of America volume of the Collected Works of Charles Portis published last year. Portis (1933 -- 2000) was a Southern writer, born and raised in Arkansas. He earned a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter in New York City and London. In 1965, he returned to Arkansas where he lived the rest of his life and wrote his five novels. Portis shunned publicity and lived in relative obscurity, but his famous novel "True Grit" (1968) was a best-seller and was filmed twice, in 1969, in a film starring John Wayne and directed by Henry Hathaway and in 2010, in a film directed by the Coen Brothers and starring Jeff Bridges.

Portis was a humorist, but he was much more. His novels, and the shorter works collected in this volume, show a sharp-eyed observation of American characters and American life. He wrote in a deadpan style in which every word tells. His characters tend to be eccentrics, loners, and outsiders without a clear sense of direction. The novels are picaresque and have particular settings but also are road novels with long journeys. With all their sharpness and sense of human foibles, the novels show an acceptance of people and their possibilities more than a social critique. A recent essay by Jonathan Lethem, aptly described Portis, with his focus on odd characters and situations as the "Grand Poobah of the Antigrandiose". (New York Review of Books, June 20, 2024, pp. 34 --36).

Laughter and humor are important in troubled times, as is an understanding of the range of American life. It is valuable to think of Portis on Independence Day and to be grateful for this volume of his writings.

Portis wrote his five novels over a 25-year period. The first two were commercial successes and were made into films. The final three are more obscure and difficult.

"Norwood" (1966) tells the story of Norwood Pratt, a discharged marine, who travels from California to his home in Texas, to New York City, and then back to Texas to collect a small debt owned by a friend. "Norwood" is full of country music and of strange adventures and characters, including a college-educated chicken named Joann. It is an accessible, humorous novel about road life, odd characters, and a seemingly ordinary young man coming into his own. It is a good place to start in reading Portis.

"True Grit" (1968) is unusual among Portis's novels in that it has a developed plot and is a story of revenge. It moves from Arkansas to Texas in the 1870s in search of a ruthless killer. The main character and narrator is Mattie Ross, who pursues her father's killer at the age of 14 with the assistance of the redoubtable Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne and Jeff Bridges in the film adaptations). Mattie narrates the story of her youth much later in 1918, as an unmarried, determined successful woman, devoted to the Bible and to moralizing. Although "True Grit" does not offer a triumphalist portrayal of the settlement of the West, it shows a love for the United States, for the land, and for the diversity and strengths of the people. With all his faults, Rooster Cogburn displays strong loyalties and heroic qualities and inspires Mattie through her long life.

Eleven years separate "True Grit" from Portis's third novel "The Dog of the South" (1979), told in the first person by Ray Midge, 26, of Little Rock, Arkansas, a young man with no particular purpose in life. Ray undertakes a mad journey from Arkansas through Mexico to Belize in search of his wife who has run off with his friend and his car. Ray is more interested in the car. The novel features an extensive cast of characters, including American hippies, radicals and religious fanatics and features a former doctor, Doc Symes, who becomes a travelling companion of Ray and incessantly expounds his view of the world. The novel has a rare sense of the ridiculous while inviting the reader to peer a little below the surface.

"Masters of Atlantis" (1985) has an omniscient third person narrator and involves the story of Gnomonism over a sixty year period beginning with the end of WW I. Gnomonism is a fictitious secret society along the lines of Freemasonry or Rosicrucianism. The main character, Lamar Jimmerson, becomes the Master of the Gnomon Order following a chance encounter in France. He establishes the Order in his hometown in Indiana where it thrives initially and then fades into obscurity after WW II. Jimmerson is gullible but with a sincere interest in spirituality. Most of his associates lack this sincerity and seek instead the money. Portions of the story become a form of road novel and follow the adventures of Jimmerson's acolytes across the country. Portis is sympathetic and merciless in equal measure -- sympathetic to the spiritual search, merciless to the shallowness of his characters.

Portis's final novel "Gringos" (1991) is set in Yucatan in southeastern Mexico. Portis spent a great deal of time in Mexico over his life. Jimmy Burns, a 41 year old expatriate from the United States narrates the story, which features a wide variety of eccentric characters including hippies, anthropologists, seekers of UFOs, and ex-convicts from both the United States and Mexico. Jimmy has little sense of direction in his life until he sets off on a mission to the jungles of Yucatan to find and rescue three people who have disappeared. "Gringos" is Portis's longest, most complex novel with Jimmy coming to understand, at last, that "You had to commit to something. You had to plant a tree somewhere."

The Library of America has done a service in publishing this volume of the works of Charles Portis. He has a distinctive American voice. It was good to read his works over the past several months and to write about them in celebration of Independence Day.

Robin Friedman

[Vivienne Strauss · Rating 4 out of 5]

These novels were all great and unique in their own right - I will have to come back to this for the short stories and other writings- after a little over a 1,000 pages of small print and very wordy writing I need a break.

Norwood - a truly bizarre and amusing roadtrip from west to east and back again.
True Grit - probably my favorite of them all - somehow, I'd never seen either movie version so it was new to me
The Dog of The South - another amusing road trip story - the description of the car on its own was hilarious
Masters of Atlantis - a mockery of humankind, religion and secret societies.
Gringos - as with all the others - fantastic characters, some horror in this one but all ended well.

As with a lot of books of this era - a good bit of misogyny and racism - not necessarily that of the author but of his characters - one must remember the difference.

[Mark Lisac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, until several weeks ago I had long thought — on the strength of his being the author of True Grit — that Portis was a writer of westerns. Now I've read most of this collection and see he wrote some of the funniest comic novels I've ever encountered. He was apparently the victim of a lack of publicity, a fate he tended to encourage, and for which I have some sympathy. Here's an itemized list of reactions, with a sensitivity note at the end:
Norwood — 4 stars. Seems closer to a novella. But it's full of the inventiveness and attention to wry comic detail that infused all Portis's other novels aside from True Grit. The main character, Norwood Pratt, also set the pattern that tended to recur in the subsequent novels. They generally focus on a fairly uncomplicated and perhaps overly trusting man with a strong knowledge of cars and trucks and how to perform rough and ready repairs on them. (The books were written when vehicles were machines rather than computers.) The character may also have an adequate knowledge of guns. He can seem like an easy target to bad people but he is tough enough to give them a comeuppance, with appropriate levels of violence but only the appropriate level. He tends to be either solitary or self-sufficient, but often finds he attracts a woman. The women tend to be baffling characters with unexpected or hidden motivations, the motivations being sometimes good and sometimes bad. But the women can be good company. The hero himself tends to have a soft spot for and protective instincts toward children and toward animals that don't make a habit of being threatening or annoying. Norwood lives up to this general description and I found myself rooting for him despite wondering how he could land himself in awkward situations.
True Grit — 3.5 stars. A little too heavy on melodramatic moments (little Mattie Ross dropping into a pit of rattlesnakes!!) It's also fairly short and moves along quickly. The length and pace no doubt helped make it attractive to moviemakers, who filmed it twice. Rooster Cogburn is a variant of Portis's standard main character:, he knows horses rather than cars, and he has an aggressively dangerous streak akin to the rattlesnakes that Mattie finds herself keeping company with. The producers of the first film version did well to cast cute Kim Darby as Mattie. In the book she is not all that attractive a personality. That may be why Cogburn seems to develop some affection for her, although it's still not clear how anyone with his very rough edges could have a soft spot for a very irritating 14-year-old. Liked the historical lore. Thought the novel's outstanding feature was the way Portis sustained a convincing voice for the narrator (an aged Mattie) from first page to last.
The Dog of the South — 4.5 stars. Very funny picaresque story of the hero's search for his wayward wife after she leaves him to travel to Mexico with another man. The wife may or may not take second place to Ray Midge's affection for his Ford Torino, which wife Norma took along with her other man. Guy Dupree. The story has an underlying moral character. The Atlantic magazine included this one a few months ago in its list of what it deemed the 100 best American novels of the last century. I would have replaced it with the next one, Gringos.
Gringos — 5 stars. Well, maybe 4.5 stars, because it has no pretensions to great themes. But it is consistently and effortlessly funny, and it's written on a much larger scale than the other novels. Set in Mexico, it shows evidence of one-time journalist Portis's commitment to doing research on a lot of finer points in the narrative. While it is distinctively a Portis work, it can even more than the others make a reader think at times of Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiassen, Jack Kerouac, and perhaps Hunter Thompson. A handful of sentences also seem to bear the faintest echoes of Ernest Hemingway, but I may be reading too much into any sentence that uses "and" more than once. The main character, Jimmy Burns, is a former U.S. Marine and combat veteran, just like Portis was. One wonders whether his standard character, and Burns in particular, represented some daydreamy self-image; it's also possible to carry such speculation much too far.
Masters of Atlantis — Did not read, maybe will someday. Other reviewers seem to have mixed feelings about it.
Samples of journalism — Portis was good at his job but it's hard to make any journalistic writing definitely stand out from among others.
Essays, stories and one brief memoir — The short stories felt quite flat to me, possibly because Portis was trying too hard to cram a lot into them; the novels are much funnier, likely because of their more expansive space and greater variety of characters. The essays are better than the stories, although they raise suspicion that Portis stretched literal truth a long way even in the ones that were supposed to be fairly fact-based accounts (shades of Mark Twain show up here). The brief memoir of Portis's boyhood life and his Arkansas and Confederate inheritance has all the charm one can hope for in such accounts.
N.B.: The main characters are Southerners, usually from Portis's native Arkansas. Some of them occasionally utter a racial epithet now much frowned upon and largely banned from use. Portis began writing these stories in the 1960s and could correctly claim historical accuracy if he were still alive to have to defend his word choices. Yet the word also shows up once in Gringos, published in 1991; maybe he thought it was an accurate reflection of how one of his characters would talk or maybe he just liked staking out his independence.

[Book Post Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Portis is interested in morality, though he never moralizes, and his novels offer real life lessons. Beware of salesmen bearing deals. Keep your distance from hippies. Change your car’s engine oil. Most relevant for this reviewer: if a road trip should take a week, know that it will take at least a month." -Anthony Domestico

Read the full review here: https://books.substack.com/p/review-a...

[Barbara T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fantastic. The man can write!

[Oscar Calve · Rating 4 out of 5]

(already read) True Grit
August 2023 - The Dog of the South

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Portis belongs on the Mount Rushmore of American letters.

[M C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Libby book. Great. Hard to believe the same guy wrote true grit and masters of Atlantis

[Tiffany]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...