Visiting Wichita Falls a few years ago to write a column about the world’s littlest skyscraper, Edmund B. Ratner came to mind. A minor character in the novel Norwood, Ratner is a retired circus performer who billed himself during his heyday as “the world’s smallest perfect man.”
The narrator, Norwood Pratt, meets the diminutive fellow on a trip to New York City from his home in Ralph, Texas. “If you were out somewhere without anything else around you, like a desert,” Norwood muses, “and I was to start walking towards you I would walk right into you because I would think you were further off than what you were.”
The author of Norwood (Simon & Schuster, 1966) is the late Charles Portis, best known for his novel True Grit. He’s hardly known at all as the author of four other novels that are altogether different from the American classic that John Wayne made famous on the silver screen. Set in the 20th century, they feature memorable misfits and offbeat characters given to droll observations like the one above.
“His fiction,” the humorist Roy Blount, Jr., has said, “is the funniest I know.” Writing in Esquire in 1998, critic Ron Rosenbaum described Portis as “Perhaps the most original, indescribable, unique talent overlooked by literary culture in America.”
Portis was an Arkansas native who worked as a journalist in Memphis, Little Rock, New York and London, where he was bureau chief for the “New York Herald Tribune.” In 1964, he moved back to Little Rock to write novels. He died in 2020 at age 86.
In a way, Portis is now a posthumous Texan. In April 2024, my friend Steve Davis, recently retired as the literary executor of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, acquired Portis’s archive, including previously unknown material discovered in 2022 in the crawl space of a house that Portis had bought for his parents years ago. The Portis family also discovered an unfinished novel, “The Woman from Nowhere.” (“Harper’s Magazine” published an excerpt in the April 2025 issue.)
Steve and I were talking by phone recently, trying to get at the essence of Portis’s humor. It’s an impossible task, as futile as trying to explain a joke. “What he does is so difficult to pull off,” Steve said. “It’s a daunting intellectual acrobatic art.”
The Wittliff Collections, which also houses material from Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, Sandra Cisneros and other notable writers, went head to head with UT-Austin’s world-renowned Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center to acquire the Portis archive. Driving back to San Marcos from Little Rock, his rented SUV packed with 13 banker’s boxes of invaluable material, Steve couldn’t help but chuckle occasionally at his unlikely haul. He could have been a Portis character himself.
Visitors to the Wittliff Collections–on the seventh floor of Texas State’s Albert B. Alkek Library–can enjoy a lobby exhibit featuring Portis’s life and work. I regret to say they won’t see a fictional set of false teeth from a Tijuana denture factory that’s mentioned in “The Dog of the South.” The El Tigre model, as described by Dr. Reo Symes of Ferriday, La., “had two extra canines and two extra incisors of tungsten steel. Slap a set of those Tiger plates in your mouth and you can throw your oatmeal out the window. You could shred an elk steak with those boogers.”
(Joe Holley, author of six books - mostly about Texas, has been a speechwriter for Gov. Ann Richards, a staff writer for The Washington Post and a Houston Chronicle editorial writer and columnist from 2012 until the present. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017 and 2023 and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2022. [email protected] )
