It was a cortical fever.” Many a feature writer dreamed of one day becoming a fiction writer “by the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament.” “At this late date,” Wolfe wrote, “it’s hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. 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. He returned to the United States and moved into a fishing shack in Arkansas. Portis quit cold one day just like that, without a warning. That was generally regarded as a very choice job in the newspaper business. One day he suddenly quit as London correspondent for the Herald Tribune. Tom Wolfe, one of his colleagues in the Herald Tribune’s New York office, later recalled: Dick didn’t take the hint.”Īfter a year in London, Portis surprised everyone in the business. Dick Wald was my New York boss, and I told him once that the Tribune might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better. Four decades later, in 2001, he joked during an interview about how “Marx was the London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune in the 1850s. The previous November, shortly after Sir Alec Douglas-Home became prime minister and weeks before President Kennedy was assassinated, Portis became head of the London bureau of the New York Herald Tribune.

“In 1964, in the midst of so-called Swinging London, Charles McColl Portis had Karl Marx’s old job,” begins editor Ed Park in his appreciation of the author. Courtesy Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York.

New York Zoological Park.” Postcard printed by American Colortype Co., 1907. Norwood | True Grit | The Dog of the South | Masters of Atlantis | Gringos | stories & other writings | 1,105 pages “ The Angel of the Odd,” Edgar Allan Poe.“ My First Lie and How I Got Out of It,” Mark Twain.“ What Charles Portis Taught Us” (Wells Tower, The New Yorker) “ Notes on Charles Portis’s Notes” (Jay Jennings, Library of America)

The hen who dreamed