Two years later, in 1966, his first novel, Norwood, was published after being serialised in the Saturday Evening Post. Although he was considered one of the stars among a group of reporters at the “Trib” who went on to define the “new journalism”, after a year in London he left to settle at a lakeside cabin in Arkansas and write fiction. He then joined the New York Herald-Tribune where his coverage of the civil rights movement across the South was so impressive that in 1963 he became their bureau chief in London. His first job was at the Memphis Commercial-Appeal, followed by two years with the Arkansas Gazette. Discharged a sergeant, he took a journalism degree from the University of Arkansas, working on the Northwest Arkansas Times. Portis once attributed her aged Arkansas voice to his time working on a paper in his college days, editing local reports by the Arkansas town ladies who filed in longhand.Ĭharles McColl Portis was born on Decemin El Dorado, Arkansas, where his father Samuel, a teacher, had moved during an oil boom and married Alice Waddle, a writer for local papers.Īfter school, Portis enlisted in the Marines and fought in the Korean War. The book was written as a recollection, with a now-elderly Mattie providing prickly, unreliable narration.
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