After serving in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, he studied journalism at the University of Arkansas. These various put-downs, especially of himself, are a dodge, because although Portis the novelist is press-shy and publicity-averse, in his early career he was a skilled, diligent, and sometimes brilliant journalist, which the selection of his best newspaper work in Escape Velocity will demonstrate. Ray Midge, the copy editor who tracks his errant wife to Mexico in The Dog of the South, comments about the fellow copy editor who stole her away: “His dress was sloppy even by newspaper standards.” In Masters of Atlantis, newspaper people “treat as pests those who walk in off the street with inquiries, or even news.” In a New Yorker humor piece, he describes the “journalist ants” of Burma, “scurrying about on the forest floor and gathering tiny facts.” And in a long travel story about a river in Arkansas-included in the upcoming collection of his work I edited, Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany-he offers an opinion on both the climate debate and himself as a journalist: “Knowing nothing about changing weather patterns, but, being a journalist and thus having no scruples about commenting on the matter, I think they may well have changed.” In his fiction and magazine pieces over more than a half-century, the novelist Charles Portis, most celebrated for True Grit and much admired by fellow writers like Roy Blount Jr., Donna Tartt, and Wells Tower, has made relentless fun of journalists of all stripes.
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