Texas State University has acquired the archive of Charles Portis, the author of True Grit and The Dog of the South, the school announced in a news release.
Portis’ archive will be part of the San Marcos, Texas, university’s Wittliff Collections, which also hosts collections from Cormac McCarthy, Sandra Cisneros, Sam Shepard, and Rick Riordan.
Portis made his literary debut in 1966 with the novel Norwood, and followed that up two years later with True Grit, now considered a classic of the Western genre. The book was adapted in 1969 as a film directed by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne and Kim Darby; another movie adaptation came out in 2010, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld. His other novels were The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos.
Portis died in 2020, and two years later, HVAC workers discovered stacks of papers in the basement of a Little Rock, Arkansas, house. The discovery was a surprise; the author had not told anybody that he had kept an archive.
Portis’ brother, Jonathan Portis, said, “After the papers were found, we in Charles’ family debated the propriety of making them public, given his lifelong insistence on privacy. We decided the papers needed to be preserved and made available to scholars. The Wittliff Collections, with its intense focus on preservation and its large collection of the works of other writers, quickly rose to the top of our preferences.”
An inventory of Portis’ archive is available at the Wittliff Collections website.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
