About the Author

Charles Portis (1933–2020) is the author of five novels, a handful of short stories, a play, and several essays, along with journalism written early in his career. His debut novel, Norwood, was published in 1966 and was made into a movie in 1970. His second and best-known novel, True Grit, has been twice adapted for the screen, most recently by the Coen brothers in 2010; in 2013 it was named a National Endowment for the Arts Big Read Library Selection.  

Jay Jennings is Senior Editor at the Oxford American, having formerly been a writer for Sports Illustrated and a features editor at Tennis magazine. His book Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City was published in 2010. A native of Little Rock and a longtime friend of Portis, he is the editor of Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany (2012) and the co-author (with Graham Gordy) of an as-yet-unproduced film adaptation of Portis’s novel The Dog of the South.

Reviews

“A new volume by the Library of America, edited by the Arkansas journalist Jay Jennings, gathers all these characters and more, collecting Portis’s five novels together with his short stories and some of his journalism, including the parody of an advice column that ran in this magazine. It’s absurdly fun to follow his oddballs and their odysseys, but something more than fun, too. Portis’s genius went beyond character in the strictly literary sense, to reveal something about moral character and many somethings about the character of this country.”—Casey Cep, The New Yorker

"It is hard to imagine a greater or more valuable pleasure-per-ounce package than the collected works of Charles Portis." — The New Republic

“Now the five novels, the memoir, and some short stories, essays and newspaper articles have been gathered together in one tidy volume edited by Jay Jennings, and installed where they belong, in the pantheon of American letters, the Library of America… The comedy is ineffable, inextricable from its context, the ready-for-anything American mindscape. As P.G. Wodehouse is to England and Flann O’Brien to Ireland, so Charles Portis is to America: a writer whose comedy strikes a celestial chord and whose characters, to quote Evelyn Waugh on Wodehouse, “live in their own universe like the characters of a fairy story.””—Katherine Powers, Wall Street Journal

“There won’t be a parade, but perhaps there should be.”—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette


“A meticulously curated new compendium from the Library of America, which collects his five novels and assorted other works, allows for a fresh opportunity to reckon with his slippery, unsettled legacy … In one sense, a Library of America edition of Portis’s work is a kind of surprise ending. It’s tempting to point out the disjunction between the author’s fundamental outsider stance and his postmortem embrace by the institutional intelligentsia.” —The Washington Post