True Grit

The #1 New York Times bestselling classic frontier adventure novel, with over two million copies in print

True Grit 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. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the homicide into Indian Territory. First brought to the big screen in the classic 1969 western starring John Wayne and remade brilliantly in 2010 by the Coen brothers and starring Jeff Bridges, True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through.

This mass-market edition includes an afterword by bestselling author Donna Tartt.


Author: Charles Portis
Publisher: Overlook Press
Published: 10/30/2012
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 7.42h x 4.34w x 0.69d
ISBN13: 9781468306293
ISBN10: 1468306294
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Westerns | General

About the Author
Charles Portis (1933-2020) lived most of his life in Arkansas, where he was born and raised. He was a graduate of the University of Arkansas, which in 2018 awarded him an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters. He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, was the London bureau chief of the New York Herald-Tribune, and was a writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of four other novels, also available from The Overlook Press: Norwood, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos. A selection of his writing has been collected in Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany.