The Curse of 'True Grit'

“People do not give it credence,” Mattie Ross recounts in the marvelous opening paragraphs of Charles Portis’s True Grit, “that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” It’s a voice that could define almost every Portis protagonist—a self-taught, partly untamed individual of weather-roughened accomplishments striving to articulate the story of their life while battering along the roads that carry them (briefly) away from home and (inevitably) back home again.