True Grit

After her father is murdered, fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross refuses to let anyone else handle justice on her behalf. She hires Rooster Cogburn, a boozy, trigger-happy U.S. Marshal reputed to have "true grit," and sets out with him and a vain Texas Ranger into dangerous Indian Territory to hunt down her father's killer.

Charles Portis tells the story in Mattie's own unsentimental, formally precise voice decades after the events, blending frontier adventure with dry comic wit in one of the defining Western novels of the twentieth century.