For one thing, they like to make funny movies. You can see why Joel and Ethan Coen, having adapted McCarthy’s grim “No Country for Old Men,” moved on to “True Grit,” which opens this month. If that sounds like a description of Cormac McCarthy’s characters, the great difference is that Portis finds comedy in the aspiration to heroism, and his characters are forever plagued by a suspicion of their own ridiculousness. Portis’s characters have a self-conscious manner, a homespun formality of speech, that comes from the effort to inhabit grandiose roles: lone avenger on a quest nefarious outlaw besieged moral exemplar. Rooster: “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.” Ned: “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”

Rooster: “I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker’s convenience. It makes a certain sense that Wayne, playing the trigger-happy drunk Rooster Cogburn, finally got his Academy Award by delivering dialogue largely borrowed from Portis - most famously this exchange before a gunfight:

But there are passionate readers, among them the literary maestro Jonathan Lethem, the crime writer George Pelecanos and Ron Rosenbaum, that obsessive reporter on our obsessions, who regard Portis as a major figure in his own right: possessor of an original American literary voice comparable to Mark Twain’s. Charles Portis, a novelist from Arkansas who politely declines to promote himself or his work, is best known as the author of “True Grit.” That’s mostly because John Wayne starred in the film adaptation, winning his only best actor Oscar for it in 1969.

True grit portis