Charles Portis lives in Arkansas, where he was born and educated. He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. As a reporter, he wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune, and was also its London bureau chief. His first novel, Norwood, was published in 1966. His other novels are True Grit, The Dog of the South, and Gringos.

TRUE GRIT

The book is written as a world-weary spinster’s account of the events of 1873, when, as a spiky 14 year-old, she avenged her father’s murder. Portis’s language is blunt but poetic. The murderer, Tom Chaney, was “a short man with cruel features”. Rooster Cogburn, the flawed hero, “a pitiless man who loves to pull a cork”.

Passing characters are dissected: one is “a long-backed man with a doorknob head and a mouth full of prominent teeth”, another is a gossip who “could no more keep her mouth closed than can a yellow catfish”. The action rattles along and events are seen in the hard, unsentimental eye that Cormac McCarthy would assume a few decades later.

The first film adaptation, starring John Wayne, was made in 1969 and when Portis visited the set he marvelled at the way Wayne and Robert Duvall blew up and stormed off – only to return as though nothing had happened.

The original film, though, lacks the book’s charm and power – something the Coen brothers captured far more successfully, a success reflected in the 10 Oscar nominations the film received.