Charles Portis

True Grit is his most famous novel--first published in 1968, and the basis for the movie of the same name starring John Wayne. It tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash money. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available...

Jimmy Burns is an expatriate American living in Mexico who has an uncommonly astute eye for the absurd little details that comprise your average American. For a time, Jimmy spent his days unearthing pre-Colombian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing person situation-whatever it takes to remain "the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers.†?...

Collected here in Escape Velocity, edited by Jay Jennings, is his "miscellany" journalism, short fiction, memoir, and even the play Delray's New Moon, published for the first time in this volume. Portis covers topics as varied as the civil rights movement, road tripping in Baja, and Elvis' s visits to his aging mother for publications such as the New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post. Fans of Portis's droll Southern humor and quirky characters...

Darby hires the drunken, one-eyed, overweight marshal Rooster Cogburn, played by Wayne, to find and kill the man who murdered her father and stole all the family's money. She accompanies him on his journey to find the killer, as does Campbell, a Texas Ranger who wants a reward.

The cantankerous Rooster is hired by a headstrong young girl (Kim Darby) to find the man who murdered her father and fled with the family savings.