Recommendations
Books Like True Grit
Eight novels of frontier justice, moral determination, and the American West
Portis's masterpiece of voice and moral clarity recommends fiction that examines the American Western experience with rigor and wit, explores the tradition of the revenge or justice narrative, and celebrates heroines who operate by their own moral code.
- 1Buy
Dog of the South
by Charles Portis
Ray Midge drives through the American South and Mexico tracking his wife and car — the Portis novel most likely to be loved by fans of True Grit; where Mattie is entirely without self-pity or irony, Ray is entirely without self-knowledge, and both voices are equally perfect; the comedy is drier, the action less violent, but the pleasure of inhabiting a completely realized Portis consciousness is identical
- 2Buy
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
The Glanton Gang's scalp-hunting campaign on the Texas-Mexico border — the counter-text to True Grit: the same period, the same geography, the same violence, but without Mattie's faith in justice or Portis's faith in the human capacity for moral seriousness; reading True Grit immediately before or after Blood Meridian defines the full range of what the Western can be and shows how differently the same historical material can be treated
- 3Buy
Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
Two retired Texas Rangers drive a cattle herd from Texas to Montana — the Western epic that stands alongside True Grit as the most fully realized literary treatment of the period; where True Grit is compact, perfect, and told entirely through Mattie's single voice, Lonesome Dove is vast, multiple-voiced, and elegiac; both novels refuse the Western myth of triumphant conquest and insist on the human cost of the frontier
- 4Buy
Little House on the Prairie
by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Laura Ingalls and her family on the Kansas frontier in the 1870s — the children's classic that is the most widely read version of the same frontier world Mattie Ross inhabits; where True Grit approaches the period through violence and justice, Wilder approaches it through domesticity and endurance; both books are told by a woman looking back at her childhood in the same American West and refusing to romanticize what she found there
- 5Buy
Plainsong
by Kent Haruf
Two bachelor brothers take in a pregnant teenager in a small Colorado town — Haruf's novel is not a Western in the genre sense but shares True Grit's moral landscape: a flat-plains American interior where people must live by their own moral codes because formal institutions are insufficient; Haruf's prose, like Portis's, is stripped of ornament and entirely sure of itself
- 6Buy
The Professor's House
by Willa Cather
Professor St. Peter in his cluttered old house, unable to move forward, while his student Tom Outland's story of a cliff dwelling is told in the novel's center — Cather's Western fiction is the literary-critical companion to True Grit; where Portis examines the West through action and voice, Cather examines it through memory and loss; both novelists treat the American West as a moral landscape that requires a response commensurate with its demands
- 7Buy
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko
Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran of World War Two, returns home struggling with trauma — Silko's novel is the Native American perspective on the same Western landscape True Grit inhabits (including Indian Territory where Mattie pursues Tom Chaney); where True Grit sees the West through the eyes of a white Arkansan, Ceremony sees it through Laguna Pueblo eyes; both are required reading for understanding what the American West was and what it cost
- 8Buy
Horseman, Pass By
by Larry McMurtry
Lonnie, a young man on his grandfather's Texas ranch, watches the old man deal with a diseased herd — McMurtry's first novel (filmed as Hud in 1963) is the earliest version of the Texas ranching world he later expanded in Lonesome Dove; recommended for True Grit readers who want the Texas frontier brought into the mid-twentieth century, with the same moral seriousness and refusal of sentiment
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