Reading Order
True Grit Reading Order
Charles Portis's True Grit (1968) is a standalone novel narrated by Mattie Ross, a fourteen-year-old from Yell County, Arkansas, who hires the one-eyed, hard-drinking U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to pursue the man who killed her father — and who insists on accompanying him into Indian Territory. One of the great American novels, combining perfect period voice, dark comedy, and genuine moral seriousness.
Where to start
True Grit
Complete True Grit Book List
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True Grit
Charles Portis·1968·Mattie's account of the pursuit — complete standalone. The 2010 Coen Brothers adaptation is closer to the novel than John Wayne's 1969 film. Both are worth seeing. - Buy
Dog of the South
OptionalCharles Portis·1979·Ray Midge tracks his wife and car through the American South and Mexico — Portis's most comic novel; fans of Mattie's voice usually love it equally. - Buy
Masters of Atlantis
OptionalCharles Portis·1985·Two men spend their lives devoted to an elaborate secret society based on a pamphlet someone sold them — Portis at his most comic and most precise. - Buy
The Old Gringo
OptionalCarlos Fuentes·1985·An aging American journalist (based on Ambrose Bierce) crosses into revolutionary Mexico in 1914 — for fans of True Grit who want the Mexican perspective on the same border period.
True Grit — Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Mattie Ross such a memorable narrator?
Mattie's voice is one of the great achievements in American fiction: she narrates in the first person from old age, looking back on her fourteen-year-old self with the same matter-of-fact, slightly self-congratulatory confidence she had at the time. Her prose is legalistic, biblical, precise, and completely unsentimental — she is a Presbyterian from Yell County, and she carries all of that with her. What makes her remarkable is the gap between her manner (which suggests complete control) and her situation (a child in Indian Territory pursuing a murderer); the comedy and the moral seriousness of the novel both arise from this gap. Portis never condescends to Mattie and never lets the reader do so either.
Is True Grit a Western?
It is set in a period and geography we associate with Westerns, but it is a very unusual example of the genre. Most Westerns center on male protagonists; True Grit centers on a woman. Most Westerns present the frontier as a space of freedom and possibility; True Grit presents it as a space of danger and hardship that Mattie navigates through competence and nerve. Most Westerns treat violence as exciting; True Grit's violence is quick, ugly, and consequence-laden. Portis is using the Western setting and conventions while systematically subverting its mythology — which is exactly what Cormac McCarthy is doing in Blood Meridian, though from a completely different angle.
What happened to Mattie's arm?
Mattie's arm is bitten by a rattlesnake during the pursuit and becomes gangrenous; it is eventually amputated. The amputation is narrated in the novel's epilogue, when the adult Mattie — one-armed, unmarried, still running her father's business in Yell County — reflects on her life and what the pursuit meant to her. The loss of the arm is presented without self-pity: Mattie is the kind of person who would treat the loss of a limb as a practical problem to be managed, not a tragedy to be mourned. The epilogue's final image — Mattie looking back on Rooster Cogburn's death and their relationship, concluding that he "rode a fine horse" — is one of the most perfect closings in American fiction.
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