Charles in Charge

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: January 7, 2011


Charles Portis’s “True Grit” (1968) has popped up on the trade paperback list — it’s No. 11 this week — thanks to the Coen brothers’ film adaptation.



This column will appear in print in the Jan. 16, 2011 issue of the Book Review. On the Web, the best-seller lists and the “Inside the List” column are available one week early.
It isn’t the first time the elusive Portis, now living quietly in Little Rock, Ark., has been buoyed by Hollywood. The producer Bob Rehme recently boasted to Michael Cieply of The Times that back in 1968, Paramount staffers bought boxfuls of “True Grit” from stores they thought were being monitored for this paper’s best-seller list, to ensure it would hit in advance of the 1969 John Wayne movie. The book entered the hardcover fiction list at No. 3 and hung on for a 22-week run. It remains Portis’s only best seller, though its heroine, the eloquent underage avenger Mattie Ross, does report working years later on a sure-fire hit of her own, titled “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! May God, whose laws you have broken and before whose dread tribunal you must appear, have mercy upon your soul. Being a personal recollection of Isaac C. Parker, the famous Border Judge”