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.

There is no knowing what lies in a man's heart. On a trip to buy ponies, Frank Ross is killed by one of his own workers. Tom Chaney shoots him down in the street for a horse, $150 cash, and two Californian gold pieces. Ross's unusually mature and single-minded fourteen-year-old daughter Mattie travels to claim his body, and finds that the authorities are doing nothing to find Chaney. Then she hears of Rooster - a man, she's told, who has grit - and convinces him to join her in a quest into dark, dangerous Indian territory to hunt Chaney down and avenge her father's murder.

'True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? I do not know ... What a writer!'

'Charles Portis is a writer who - if there's any justice - will come to be regarded as the author of classics of the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain'

'Portis has made an epic and a legend. Mattie Ross should soon join the pantheon of America's legendary figures such as Kit Carson, Wyatt Earp and Jesse James'

'One of those rare sweet delights ... one can recommend to inveterate fiction readers and to those who read only one or two novels a year'

A classic American novel