Description

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Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man’s Report is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansan Charles Portis (1933–2020), best known for the novel True Grit and its film adaptations. Hailed by one critic as “the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain” and as America’s “least-known great novelist,” Portis has garnered a devoted fan base with his ear for language, picaresque characters, literary Easter eggs, and talent for injecting comedy into even the smallest turn of phrase. As a former Marine who served on the front lines of the Korean War and as a journalist who observed firsthand the violent resistance to the civil rights movement, Portis reported on atrocities that came to inform his fiction profoundly. His novels take aim at colonialism and notions of American exceptionalism, focusing on ordinary people, often vets, searching for safe havens in a fallen world.

Haunted Man’s Report, a deeply insightful literary exploration of Portis’s singular and underexamined oeuvre, celebrates this novelist’s great achievement and is certain to prove a valuable guide for readers new to Portis as well as aficionados.

About the Author

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Robert Cochran, professor of English at the University of Arkansas, serves as editor of the University of Arkansas Press’s Arkansas Character series. He is the author of Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life and A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice. Haunted Man’s Report is his first work of literary criticism since Samuel Beckett: A Study of the Short Fiction (1991).

Praise For…

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“What are we Portis fans to do, after re-reading the Little Rock laureate’s five novels to pieces? Cochran’s smart, engaging critical biography makes a terrific companion volume to Escape Velocity. Even grizzled Portisheads will find fresh glimmers of insight.”
—Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams