Author charles portis biography
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It was a source of some annoyance to Charles Portis that Shakespeare never wrote about Arkansas. As the novelist pointed out, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, impossible: Hernando de Soto had ventured to the area in , members of his expedition wrote about their travels in journals that were translated into English, and at least one of those accounts was circulating in London when Shakespeare was working there in To Portis, it was also perfectly obvious that the exploration of his home state could have been fine fodder for the Bard: “It is just the kind of chronicle he quarried for his plots and characters, and DeSoto, a brutal, devout, heroic man brought low, is certainly of Shakespearean stature. But, bad luck, there is no play, with a scene at the Camden winter quarters, and, in another part of the forest, at Smackover Creek, where willows still grow aslant the brook.”
Everything about this grievance is pure Portis. There’s the easy erudition—knowing that an English translation of
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The American Anthropology of Charles Portis
Charles Portis has died and he was the funniest novelist since Mark Twain, but it’s easy not to know that. His work barely grazed the mainstream, despite going at least two for five in his attempts to write the great American novel. It isn’t fair. This man put William Shakespeare in the shithouse.
He mostly wrote about a specific place in midcentury southern Arkansas, where he was born, and it was the Arkansas of it all that blew me away at first. My grandpa is from a non-town in southern Arkansas that is most famous for a bridge out of it. He calls using the microwave “electrocution.” My wife didn’t understand his accent for a year. When I asked him what he thought of the moon landing, he told me with confidence that “Howard Hughes coulda gone to the moon in if he wanted to bad enough. Ain’t nobody can make me care about some lousy old rocket.”
I had never seen that guy in a novel. Then I read Charles Portis, and it turned out my grand
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Charles Portis
American author (–)
Charles McColl Portis (December 28, – February 17, ) was an American author best known for his novels Norwood () and the classic WesternTrue Grit (). Both Norwood and True Grit were adapted as films, released in and , respectively. True Grit also inspired a film sequel and a made-for-TV movie sequel. The second film adaptation of True Grit was released in [1]
In The Library of America published his Collected Works.[2] In the introduction, editor Jay Jennings observes: "Charles Portis is now recognized as a singular American genius, a writer whose deadpan style, picaresque plots, and unforgettable characters have drawn a passionate following among readers and writers."[3]
Portis has been described as "one of the most inventively comic writers of western fiction".[4]
Early life
[edit]Charles Portis was born in in El Dorado, Arkansas, the son of Alice (Waddell) and Samuel Palmer Portis.