True Grit
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
True Grit
| Author | Charles Portis |
|---|---|
| Published | 1968 |
| Pages | 235 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Charles Portis’s novel of fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, who hires the most disreputable marshal available and rides into Indian Territory after her father’s killer — narrated by Mattie as an old woman in a flat, legalistic, scripture-quoting voice that never asks for sympathy, which is why it is funny and why it holds up. |
True Grit
Where I heard about it
- Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, a 468-title curriculum published on Substack in December 2025, in the Ages 13–99+ band under Western — the least conventional of the three Westerns there.
About this edition
Portis takes the revenge plot straight but tells it in a register that keeps undercutting the genre’s self-importance; the book has a cult standing among writers out of proportion to his five slim novels, and the 1969 and 2010 films have somewhat obscured how good the sentences are. Its low Lexile score (800) reflects Mattie’s plain declarative sentences rather than the book’s difficulty.
Connections
- A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
- Charles Portis — the author.
- The Virginian — the conventions this novel is working against, carded from the same list.
- The Lonesome Gods — the third Western in the adult band.
- Frontier — Indian Territory in the 1870s, and the reach of federal law into it.
- Justice — Mattie’s own word for what she is after, and the book is careful never to settle whether she got it.
- Storytelling — a first-person voice doing nearly all the work.
- Republic of Letters — the portfolio idea.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.