The University of Arkansas Press is proud to announce the forthcoming publication of Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis by Robert Cochran.
Robert Cochran’s Haunted Man’s Report is a pioneering study of the novels and other writings of Arkansas-born 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 inventive take on the western genre, picaresque characters, 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, for other witnesses, defied description. 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.
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).
Haunted Man’s Report will be published in the Spring of 2024.