Charles Portis & Gustav Carlson
Who, What, Where, When
Editor’s Note
A decade before Charles Portis wrote Norwood and True Grit, the first two of the five novels he is now celebrated for, he was an undergrad journalism student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. During that time, he wrote for the college paper, The Arkansas Traveler, under the name, “Buddy Portis.”
The following pages present the text of a column (delightfully illustrated by Fayetteville comics artist Gustav Carlson) that Portis published in the Traveler on Sept. 17, 1957, and which hasn’t been republished since. The “Editor’s Note” at the time described it as “a parody on an editor’s column such as might be seen in a back, back woods weekly newspaper.”
Though clearly a youthful jeu d’esprit, it bears many of the hallmarks of Portis’s mature work: the lean prose rhythms, the mastery of deadpan comedy and regional idiom, a taste for the absurd, a flair for gently exposing his characters’ pieties and misdeeds, even what might be called a picaresque imagination.
Portis’s own worldliness—he served for several years in Korea before going to college—may help explain why, despite his focus here on “backwoods” Arkansas, the reader keeps glimpsing, as if through the trees, a wider world: Chicago and Los Angeles evoke a more cosmopolitan America, and Japan, China, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe each appear as they might have been seen at that particular time from the limited vantage point of “backwoods” Arkansas.
Our thanks to Robert Cochran, author of Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis (University of Arkansas, 2024), for bringing this piece to our attention.
Gustav Carlson (he/him) is an Ozarks-based comic author and illustrator. Gustav’s work has an emphasis on the places off the beaten path, whether that’s terrestrial or celestial. His comics include Tourist Unknown, Eve of the Ozarks, and his current dirt road fantasy horror series, Backwood Folk. Find him at https://www.backwoodfolk.com/ or @backwoodfolk on instagram.
Charles Portis (1933-2020) was the author of five novels, most famously True Grit. Born in El Dorado AR, he served in Korea from 1952-1955, received a degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas in 1958, then worked as a journalist in Arkansas, New York, and London until 1964, at which point he became a full-time writer. His Collected Works, edited by Jay Jennings, was published by the Library of America in 2023.