The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University has acquired the archive of literary legend Charles Portis, whose personal papers were discovered in a hidden cache two years after the author’s death.
The self-effacing Portis, an Arkansas native who died in 2020 at age 86, avoided publicity and kept a low profile during his lifetime. Yet his five acclaimed novels, each a luminous masterpiece of sly humor, have evoked comparisons to Mark Twain and other greats.
Bestselling author Donna Tartt, who volunteered to narrate the audiobook for True Grit, hailed Portis in 2002 as “the greatest, living, unsung American writer...an incredible, underrated genius.” Novelist Sarah Bird, who wrote a screenplay adaptation of Portis’s novel The Dog of the South said, “Portis is incomparable...There was no one like him before and there has been no one like him since.” The writer Roy Blount Jr. once observed, “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.”
