Charles Portis, the author of the truly wonderful novel, True Grit, has died at the age of eighty-six. Twitter has a gallery of tributes, all of which are worth reading, and some of which will point you to his other fiction.
True Grit begat rare children: two superior movies: one in 1969 with John Wayne and Kim Darby; the other, in 2010, with Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld. The original source material, however, is unmatched, and will always stand on its own as an example of how prose can be tough, direct, and lyrical at the same time.
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