I never did, though I had his telephone number and was occasionally within 15 feet of him in lunchrooms and beer joints.

Jennings was Portis' friend like a lot of people around these parts, he knew 'Buddy' Portis well. (The volume ought to be supplemented by 'Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany,' the 2012 collection of Portis' nonfiction, shorts stories, the play 'Delray's New Moon,' and Roy Reed's invaluable interview with Portis for the oral history of the Arkansas Gazette.) The LOA edition, edited by Little Rock writer and editor Jay Jennings, contains all five of Portis' published novels - 'Norwood,' 'True Grit,' 'The Dog of the South,' 'Masters of Atlantis' and 'Gringos' - along with a healthy selection of his stories and journalism. Portis and his fellow Arkansan Donald Harington might vie for the left-handed honor of being the least well-known great American writer, and while the superlative seems silly - none of us has ever heard of the genuine title holder - it is a handy way to begin a discussion of his work. There won't be a parade, but perhaps there should be. The Library of America's latest volume is 'Charles Portis: Collected Works.' It will be in bookstores April 4.

A newspaper is a factory it employs mechanics and craftspeople, but whatever art its employees produce is produced on their own time.īut what if you are Hemingway? Or something close? Something close enough to get treatment from the literary establishment, to be collected in omnibus editions and anthologies? To have your books outlive you, to have your name serve as a password among a dwindling but hungry class of strong readers? 'It ain't art, and you ain't Hemingway,' more than one city editor has growled at a straining-to-rise cub. You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say - today I will change the oil in my truck.

Charles portis books