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Novelist Charles Portis, author of True Grit (and more!), has died

The publicity-shy Mr. Portis earned a modest but devoted readership and accolades as America’s “least-known great writer”, according to Roy Reed at The New York Times… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Charles Portis, the publicity-shy author of “True Grit” and a short list of other novels that drew a cult following and accolades as the work of possibly the nation’s best unknown writer, died on Monday at a hospice in Little Rock, Ark. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by his brother Jonathan, who said Mr. Portis had been in hospice care for two years and in an Alzheimer’s care facility for six years prior.

Mr. Portis was in his early 30s and well established as a reporter at The New York Herald Tribune in 1964, when he decided to turn to fiction full time. The decision astonished his friends and colleagues at the paper, among them Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Nora Ephron.

He had covered the civil rights movement in the South: riots in Birmingham, Ala.; the jailing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Albany, Ga.; Gov. George C. Wallace’s attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama. And he had been assigned to a coveted post, London bureau chief. His future in journalism was bright.

But he said he was heading home; he was going to move into an Arkansas fishing shack and write novels.

“A fishing shack!” Mr. Wolfe recalled in his book “The New Journalism.” “In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.”

Within two years Mr. Portis had published his first novel, “Norwood.” It told the story of Norwood Pratt, a naïve ex-Marine from East Texas on a road trip to collect a $70 debt. Along the way he encounters, among other things, a con artist and a chicken that can play tick-tack-toe.

“Norwood” set the pattern for Mr. Portis’s use of misfits, cranks and sly humor in his fiction.

Read full post on the New York Times

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