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Topic: Charles Portis

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	A Late Report from the Charles Portis Appreciation Society
		The Charles Portis Appreciation Society held regular meetings at the Library of Congress during the early 1990s.
		At the same time, we longtime Portis fanatics are bound to feel a little dubious about whether a larger audience can really appreciate the nuances of the great man's work.
		A master of small details and lopsided observations, Portis also possesses a rich sense of spoken language: the dry, sly tones of understatement, evasion, irritability and bloviation.
	www.mclemee.com /id60.html (883 words)

	True Grit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		True Grit is a 1968 story by Charles Portis, originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, which was subsequently published again in book form with slightly different content.
		Portis’ novel tells the story of 69-year-old Mattie Ross, a pious, spinster banker who seems to love money, quoting scripture, and going to church.
		Portis writes one or more of the “seven deadly sins” into all of the characters.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/True_Grit (1331 words)

	Bookreporter.com - GRINGOS by Charles Portis
		Charles Portis is a name that is not going to appear on many lists of favorite authors.
		The result is that readers have tended to shy away from Portis, believing that all of his work is like the film adaptation of one of his novels.
		This is unfortunate; for Portis is actually an unclassifiable, quirky author with an ability to present the unusual and the unexpected in an offhand but, nonetheless, appealing manner.
	www.bookreporter.com /reviews/1585670936.asp (379 words)

	Won over by a writers' writer - The Boston Globe
		Ihave caught the Charles Portis bug, the raging admirational virus that besets writers who first encounter the work of the 70-year-old Arkansas novelist.
		It is ironic that Portis himself has become a cult figure, because he understands our need to form insular microreligions to keep sane.
		Portis is a famous refugee from daily journalism, having left the staff of the New York Herald Tribune to try his hand at writing novels.
	boston.com /ae/books/articles/2004/03/09/won_over_by_a_writers_writer (790 words)

	The Unofficial Charles Portis Website
		If you were in Professor Vesterman's seminar on Charles Portis and Tom Wolfe, please either email your final paper to me to be posted on this website, or post a link to your final paper on the message board.
		Commentary: Charles Portis' comic skill has been characterized in many ways, which can be loosely amalgamated into the idea that Portis delivers to us obsessive, often humorless eccentrics that produce unself-conscious monologues over the course of fruitless quests, all in a deadpan tone that doesn't give so much as a wink to the reader.
		Moore, Alex T. "Charles Portis Through His Critics' Eyes: All Eighty-eight Pages of Atlantean Puzzles, Egyptian Riddles and Extended Alchemical Metaphors." A virtual tour guide through the morass that is the criticism of Charles Portis' works, I wrote this 20-page paper for a seminar.
	www.rci.rutgers.edu /~wvest (1098 words)

	[No title]
		Portis overcomes the limitations of regionalism, and flips the Eastern cultural establishment’s understanding of regionalism by subverting the stereotype of the Arkansas redneck.
		Portis taps into the history of the Missouri bushwhackers to challenge the idea of honor in war and to show that there is another side to dignity in defeat in True Grit.
		Portis also turned his wit on the Nation of Islam, of which Malcom X was still a member when he appeared on news panel show, in two of Portis’s novels.
	www.rci.rutgers.edu /~wvest/portis/portCult.doc (6368 words)

	MetroActive Books \| Charles Portis
		FOUR of Charles Portis' novels are being reissued.
		But in certain cultish circles, Portis is known for his deadpan comic novels Norwood (1966), The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985), and Gringos (1991)--all being reissued by Overlook Press in attractive paperback editions.
		Portis writes road stories that spend most of their time lost on the dusty detours, celebrating the unexpected and the absurd.
	www.metroactive.com /papers/sonoma/01.18.01/portis-0103.html (628 words)

	Portis
		The characters Portis tends to illustrate throughout his novels are Arkies (or residents of Arkansas), and he "takes the cliche of the Arkansas Traveler and stands it on its head." He implicates these protagonists in adventures in a broad range of adventures in "a bewildering, and sometimes dangerous, world" (Magill 1667).
		Portis frequently illustrates the notion of the victim as being treated unfairly by the abuser and that a great injustice has been performed.
		Portis takes us on a journey searching for the Inaccessible Lost City of Dawn "that draws, like a magnet, all the lonely and dispossessed, the mad romantics and con artists of the States" to uncover the missing aspects of their lives in the Mayan rain forests (Rosenbaum 33).
	www.emory.edu /ENGLISH/Bahri/Portis.html (921 words)

	The Smoky Mountain News
		For most people, Charles Portis will be forever associated with his novel, True Grit, which was turned into the 1969 movie of the same title.
		Portis went on the write a series of novels that are among the finest works in Southern literature.
		Despite the hopeless flailing of Portis’ characters, this is a hilarious book largely due to the dialogue.
	www.smokymountainnews.com /issues/1_01/1_17_01/books_carden.shtml (863 words)

	Masters of Atlantis Review (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Portis runs head to head with Jack Butler as the best novelist Arkansas has produced (maybe -- I haven't read Donald Harington yet), and he's worth reading for his slightly bemused comic-humanist outlook, a philosophy always welcome in these dour, technocratic times.
		Masters of Atlantis is a spoof that takes itself seriously; that is to say, the subject matter is absurd, but the tone Portis takes does not draw attention to the absurdity, as he simply repeats the tale of other people's silliness with a straight face (okay, a slightly bent face).
		Yet Portis is definitely a Southern writer, just not one of the Mississippi gothic Faulkner school -- he's an Arkansan, and the lighter touch, the low-key charm, the droll irony, the realization of the slightly askew nature of life all mark Portis as a native son.
	starling.rinet.ru /music/temp/mastersofatlantis.html (579 words)

	village voice > books > My Life by Bill Clinton by Ed Park
		Portis: "[The Cumberland Presbyterians] broke with the Presbyterian Church because they did not believe a preacher needed a lot of formal education.
		Portis: "She taken a notion she wanted me to be a lawyer.
		Portis: "He hardly spoke at all except to mutter 'Crap' or 'What crap' as he processed newsmatter, affecting a contempt for all events on earth and for the written accounts of those events." [The Dog of the South, p.
	www.villagevoice.com /issues/0427/park1.php (492 words)

	True Grit - Health Care Products - HealthCareStuff.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Charles Portis has been acclaimed as one of America's foremost comic writers.
		Unfairly underated, or even misunderstood in the UK (my own well-thumbed copy is a child-oriented Puffin edition), Charles Portis' masterpiece has hitherto been quite sniffily regarded by the cognoscenti amongst us who are never stuck for a word or two, and invariably presume to dictate our literary tastes for us.
		Portis is supposedly holed up in a fishing shack in Arkansas writing a new book.
	www.healthcarestuff.com /product/1585673692-True-Grit.html (1525 words)

	Smoky Mountain News \| Arts + Events
		Charles Portis is best known as the author of True Grit — the sly western that became a John Wayne classic — but among writers, readers, and assorted Southern lunatics, he’s something of a cult hero.
		Often called our greatest unknown comic writer, Portis avoids the broad skewer for finely-sketched comic despair, and The Dog of the South is a character-driven delight.
		The plot — what there is of it — follows Ray Midge on a shambling quest to recover his Ford Torino and his estranged wife Norma.
	www.smokymountainnews.com /issues/10_04/10_20_04/art_rec_diversions.html (384 words)

	Recommended Reading: Odd Birds
		The imaginary history of a similar organization, the Gnomon Society, is recounted in Charles Portis' comic masterpiece Masters of Atlantis, first published in 1985 and currently available in paperback from Overlook Press.
		Portis creates a whole gallery of rogues, rubes, cranks and illuminati.
		Portis' own plot is certainly episodic, if also utterly American.
	www.mclemee.com /id147.html (191 words)

	Arkansas Times Blogs (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Bloomsbury is releasing a new edition of True Grit, the 1968 novel published by Arkansas native Charles Portis.
		The story, which follows the adventures of Yell County native Mattie Ross, was later adapted into a classic movie starring John Wayne.
		I think it goes without saying that most books that engage readers on this very high level are masterpieces; and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.
	www.arktimes.com /Weblogs/WeblogItemEditor.aspx?Type=2&ParentID=9eb62dbb-3994-458a-8312-f2ee19e3bcfe&WeblogID=dabe8285-8214-4a72-ae7c-7ed16bb5ed5b (110 words)

	Maud Newton: Blog
		From time to time I wonder why I haven’t yet gotten my act together and picked up a Charles Portis novel.
		Portis is thought to have influenced Larry Brown and has been compared to Mark Twain.
		Here’s a Portis short story from the May, 1996 issue of The Atlantic.
	maudnewton.com /blog/?p=2613 (149 words)

	Rake's Progress: True Get
		First published in 1985, this is one of our country's greatest comic novels by one of its greatest living writers, and yet only the faithful few know about it or him.
		Portis wrote "True Grit," a dandy little book upon which the movie most people have seen was based.
		Beyond that it is a tour de force of American idiom, a festival of bathos, and a celebration of the melancholy that boosterism, get-smart-quick schemes, and the spirit of commerce can never conquer.
	rakesprogress.typepad.com /rakes_progress/2005/07/true_get.html (469 words)

	Norwood : Charles Portis
		One Portis fan couldn’t decide whether to marry the woman he loved until she read Norwood.
		By the time he returns home to Ralph, Texas, Norwood has met his true love, Rita Lee, on a Trailways bus; befriended Edmund B. Ratner, the second shortest midget in show business and "the world’s smallest perfect fat man"; and helped Joann, "the chicken with a college education," realize her true potential in life.
		As with all of Portis’ fiction, the tone is cool, sympathetic, funny, and undeniably American.
	www.audiobooksonline.com /shopsite/078619569X.html (290 words)

	The Believer - Like Cormac McCarthy, But Funny
		Portis (who turns seventy this year) was thirty at the time, not yet a novelist, just a newspaperman seemingly blessed by that guild’s gods.
		That Portis effortlessly makes Midge, a nitpicking, book-burrowing cuckold, as indelible and appealing as the battle-scarred man of action (or strong-willed girl revenger) is ample proof of his scope and skill.
		Portis is careful to keep the tears at bay with laughter; to borrow the impromptu skeet targets from Rooster and company, he’s a literary corn dodger.
	www.believermag.com /issues/200303/?read=article_park (5713 words)

	City Pages - Portis' Head (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		For Portis the trash culture his characters breathe (comic books, "educated" chickens, cheap motels) isn't a byproduct of media saturation, much less some "postmodern condition." It's the human condition, our birthright, a natural treasure: the world, and welcome to it.
		Portis, in contrast, sees this as the personalized nuttiness that represents the only ration of sanity the world deals out to us.
		No, the lawyer replies, it's really a place where we can get food cheap "on a regular basis." Whatever the answer, for Portis the cultivation of such trivia may be the only reality principle left us in a world saturated with adspeak and cheap goods.
	www.citypages.com /databank/20/985/article8094.asp (1497 words)

	Critical Mass - A fine beginning
		The broad similarities between the two novels are unmistakable--Portis' heroine, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, lights out into the territories (just as Huck does at the end of his novel) to avenge the death of her father.
		True Grit is a little classic, and Charles Portis is a treasure.
		Portis, incidentally, worked at the Herald Tribune with two more of my heroes, Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin.
	www.erinoconnor.org /archives/2005/02/a_fine_beginnin.html (2504 words)

	The Austin Chronicle Books: The Latest in Paper
		No disrespect to the Duke -- Rooster Cogburn brought home an Oscar, Wayne's only Academy Award -- but while reading Charles Portis' work is equal parts cinema and odyssey, to the Portis hardcore, the film is like a trip to the mall compared to the novel's real vacation.
		Portis' characters are painfully human; they are often complicated, sometimes plain wretched, and always worth the price of admission.
		Consider the young horse trader Cook, who looked old when he died because "he was carrying a twenty-one foot tape worm along with his business responsibilities and that aged him." Blindfold your pony and wade into this book.
	www.austinchronicle.com /issues/dispatch/2003-03-21/books_feature2.html (321 words)

	NPR : Pelecanos on the Enduring Power of 'True Grit'
		But Charles Portis' novel, published in 1968, is even better.
		It's a dark coming-of-age tale told in the deceptively innocent voice of a 14-year-old frontier girl, Mattie Ross, who seeks vengeance for the murder of her father in the years just after the Civil War.
		When I finally did get around to reading the book, I found that most of the famous dialogue from the film was lifted verbatim from the novel.
	www.npr.org /templates/story/story.php?storyId=5445836 (3729 words)

	Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant » Corpses, Underrated Novelists and Television
		Alex Beam calls Charles Portis “the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.” Ron Rosenbaum’s also crazy about him.
		Portis is having four of his books reisused by the Overlook Press.
		A noon run to the bookstore (with other matters in mind) indicated that the Overlook editions were indeed out, though I did not check the printing date.
	www.edrants.com /?p=379 (392 words)

	Dog Of The South, The
		As a novelist of unique wit and vision, Charles Portis has invited comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, and his writing has garnered accolades from the likes of Roy Blount, Jr., Nora Ephron, and Sam Shepard.
		This classic novel, the first in a series of Portis re-issues, is a perfect invitation into this master's brilliantly singular view of America.
		As Midge chases Norma and Symes and tries to sort the true from the false Dix sightings, Portis spins an extraordinary novel that addresses with comic eloquence the deep longing of the American psyche for things just to make some sense.
	www.audiobooksonline.com /shopsite/0786194642.html (271 words)

	Salon People \| The world's most miserable gazillionaire (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Back in the 1960s, when I was what one of Portis' finely carved characters might call a "wet-behind-the-ears little peckerwood," somebody gave me his first novel, "Norwood." I read it in one sitting and went looking for more Portis, but there wasn't any.
		In "Combinations of Jacksons," Portis, who began his career as a journalist, recalls growing up in a small town in Arkansas during World War II.
		If I could get there in time to make my arrangements, then the agents in their stupid fury would overlook the life-giving reed, one among so many, and, with their boots splashing down eight inches away from my rigid underwater body, go stupidly on their way downstream.
	www.salon.com /people/col/cruic/1999/05/08/portis (1050 words)

	Books
		The promotional material for this recording contains a quotation from Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire magazine calling Charles Portis "the least-known great writer in America." I usually try to ignore such blurbs since they adorn the dust jackets of almost all the mediocre novels published today.
		But as I listened to this delightful story I came to the conclusion that Rosenbaum wasn't too far off.
		With language that is me!morable but not invasive, Portis reveals the nobility of a simple soul whose roots are in the sort of place most of us see only from an airplane or out the window of a car.
	www.crisismagazine.com /december2001/book6.htm (299 words)

	CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: The Church in China
		On 26 March, 1693, Charles Maigrot, of the Missions Etrangères, vicar Apostolic of Fu-kien, and later titular bishop of Conon, issued a mandate condemning the Chinese Rites.
		This was approved by Clement XI who appointed as legatus a latere Charles Thomas de Tournon, Patriarch of Antioch, to carry the decree to China.
		Tournon arrived at Canton 8 April and was received at Peking by the Emperor K'ang-hi, who was favorable to the Jesuits (31 Dec., 1705).
	www.newadvent.org /cathen/03669a.htm (11433 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-29)
		Soon he is basking in the lore of lost Atlantis, convinced that his mission on earth is to administer and expand the ranks of this noble brotherhood.
		Charles Portis lives in Arkansas, where he was born and educated.
		He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War.
	luckymojo.com /esoteric/interdisciplinary/cy200207mastersofatlantis.txt (382 words)

	Portis,Charles Books - Signed, used, new, out-of-print
		Portis is one of America's foremost comic writers.
		It tells of his life in Hope, Arkansas and surveys his political experience, which was marked by both success and failure--and "comeback." It asks whether or not he would be a good president, based on his previous experience, and seems to answer in...
		True grit : a novel by Charles Portis.
	www.alibris.com /search/books/author/Portis,Charles (373 words)

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