Little-known author of 'True Grit,' Charles Portis penned inventive stories of con men, losers and seekers of truth. He died Monday at 86.
Charles Portis was not only one of the best writers you probably never heard of — he was almost certainly the best writer who was never taught to you in school either., was that good.
Many times I listed my favorite Portis novels — such as “The Dog of the South” or “Masters of Atlantis”or a graduate seminar in contemporary American fiction. But I could never come up with anything better to tell my students than this: holding up one of his books, I would fan through the pages at random, like a magician fanning a deck of cards, and tell them: “Go ahead. Pick a passage. Any passage.
I mean, come on. How can you “explicate” or analyze” a paragraph like that? The story is already banging along well before the paragraph even starts. This Guy Dupree character is a wild man who won’t stop at stealing a wife, a “good raincoat” or a shotgun to rest against his “monkey shoulder” — andThere’s a famous passage in J.D. Salinger’s “A Catcher in the Rye”
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