The reviews were terrific … He sold books to the movies … He made a fortune … A fishing shack! In Arkansas! It was too goddamned perfect to be true, and yet there it was.

Then he wrote True Grit, which was a best seller. In six months he wrote a beautiful little novel called Norwood. The Queen probably did underappreciate him.Īfter a year of reporting stories on telephones he suspected were wiretapped, so frequently did the lines click and break, Portis returned to his native Arkansas, where he still lives, and found a typewriter and a remote cabin in the Ozarks. Wolfe sat with Jimmy Breslin and Portis at The New York Herald Tribune, a paper, Wolfe recalled, that “was like the main Tijuana bullring for feature writers.” He watched Portis charge right out to become bureau chief in London, a move that reportedly put an end to a romance he had going with Nora Ephron (who would later compare him to Gabriel García Márquez.) Once Portis got to London, he met the Queen with a bright red cigarette burn on the end of his nose, the previous evening’s drinking bet gone wrong.

Tom Wolfe expended a fair amount of words in “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’” about Portis and his uncanny transition from newspapering to novel-writing, and that was back in 1972. , his first novel, let us now further appreciate America’s appreciated-exactly-enough novelist, Charles Portis.īack when the appreciation was insufficient, Donna Tartt and Wells Tower were especially effective in tipping the scales, and Ron Rosenbaum’s cheerleading campaign in Esquire and The New York Observer had a huge impact in getting Portis’s novels back into print. So, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Norwood A novelist can withstand only so many pieces about how he’s America’s most underappreciated writer until he becomes appreciated exactly enough.

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