He ends up spending only $100 on the horses. Ross takes $250 with him to pay for the horses along with two gold pieces he always carried. One day, Frank Ross and Chaney go to Fort Smith to buy some horses. Chaney isn't much use as a farmhand and Mattie has only scorn for him, referring to him as 'trash.' She says her father, a good, kind man, only hired him out of pity. As an old woman in the year 1928, she tells the story of her adventures many years earlier, when, at the age of fourteen, she undertook a quest to avenge her father’s death at the hands of a drifter named Tom Chaney.Īs Mattie's tale begins, Chaney is employed on the Ross’ family farm in west central Arkansas, near the town of Dardanelle in Yell County. Portis’ novel is narrated in the first person by Mattie Ross, a thrifty, churchgoing spinster distinguished by a rare independence and strength of mind. Another adaptation, also called True Grit, was made in 2010 by the Coen Brothers, starring Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross and Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn. In 1969, True Grit was adapted for the screen as an American Western film starring John Wayne, which spawned a sequel in 1975 entitled Rooster Cogburn.

Portis subsequently re-issued it in book form with a somewhat changed storyline. True Grit by Charles Portis first appeared as a 1968 serial in The Saturday Evening Post.

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