Charles Portis wrote one of Garrison Keillor's favorite novels; Jonathan Lethem calls him "everybody's favorite least-known great novelist"; and Roy Blount, Jr. says Portis "could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he'd rather be funny." When the New York Herald Tribune folded and Portis quit his journalism job, according to Tom Wolfe, he moved back to Arkansas, wrote novels and got rich off the royalties after his novel True Grit became one of John Wayne's last great films: "It was too goddamned perfect to be true," Wolfe wrote, and yet there it was." Then, like Salinger, Portis pretty much disappeared to live an ordinary life, laboring over his writing until he got it perfect.
He continued to write, including four more brilliant novels, the last of which came out in 1991. (All of them have been reissued and kept in print by Overlook Press.) In editing Escape Velocity, Jay Jennings has done a terrific job of tracking down many of Portis's works, including some stunningly good examples of his early newspaper reporting, as well as short stories, travel pieces, a memoir and a never-before-published comic three-act play, Delray's New Moon.
Escape Velocity, following Joel and Ethan Coen's remake of True Grit, could bring about a well-deserved revival for the nearly 80-year-old Portis. The title comes from his novel The Dog of the South: "A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later," Portis wrote. "They can't quite achieve escape velocity." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher/Arkansas resident