"Tom Wolfe, who worked with Portis as a reporter at the New York Herald-Tribune in the early 1960s called him 'the original laconic cutup.' A generation of novelists since then have simply regarded him as a writers' writer and have made his name a sort of secret password. Soon, they'll no longer have him to themselves." --Rolling Stone Magazine
"An epic and a legend."--The Washington Post
"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
"An instant classic... Read it and have the most fun you've had reading a novel in years, maybe decades."--Newsday
"Skillfully constructed, a comic tour de force."--The New York Times Book Review
"Charles Portis details the savagery of the 1870s frontier through an astonishing narrative voice: that of the 14-year-old Mattie Ross, a flinty, skeptical, Bible-thumping scourge"--Wall Street Journal
"I loved that book. Charles Portis got a real Mark Twain feeling, the cynicism and the humor."--John Wayne
"'[The Coen Brothers] wanted to really make a version of the book by Charles Portis, and that was the first big piece of direction that was given to me by those guys: Don't study the movie, study the book. That's what I did and whenever you're making a movie of a book, it's wonderful because you've got so much more insight into the characters and the story that way.'"--Jeff Bridges in USA Weekend
Charles Portis lives in Arkansas where he was born and educated. He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. He was the London bureau chief of the New York Herald-Tribune, for which he also wrote as a reporter. He is the author of Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, Gringos, and Norwood.
