“Rooster coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and coughed some more. “The brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed,” she says. She finds him in bed at 10 o’clock in the morning, fully clothed and hung over. One of Mattie’s first impressions of Cogburn, who patrols the territory out of Fort Smith, is harsh. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012.

The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help. It was reissued in paperback before the release of the second film adaptation. Portis’s tale of the West became a best-seller and the basis of two movies. And he had been assigned to a coveted post, London bureau chief. Wallace’s attempt to stop the desegregation of the University of Alabama. He had covered the civil rights movement in the South: riots in Birmingham, Ala. The decision astonished his friends and colleagues at the paper, among them Jimmy Breslin and Tom Wolfe. 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. Portis had been in hospice care for two years and in an Alzheimer’s care facility for six years prior. His death was confirmed by his brother Jonathan, who said Mr. 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.

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