Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences

Robert Cochran - Another Border Trilogy: Portis after True Grit

The Pryor Center Presents lecture series continued May 1, 2025, with "Another Border Trilogy: Portis after True Grit," with Robert Cochran.

Cochran's most recent book, Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis, is a study of the writings of Arkansas writer Charles Portis, most celebrated for the astounding success of True Grit but more recently riding a wave centered on the reprinting of all five of his novels in the gold-standard Library of America series.

True Grit, for all its deserved preeminence, is an outlier among Portis novels. The second of his five, it was followed by three others — The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985) and Gringos (1991) — which share sufficient elements of locale and structure to make them coherently approachable as a unit.

"There are Portis fans who have great admiration for all these books," Cochran says. "I'm one of these. There are even a few who've lamented the great success of True Grit as casting them into its shadow. I'm not one of those. They'll find their audiences."

Cochran is a professor of English and director of the Center for Regional and Arkansas Studies at the University of Arkansas. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and has been awarded three Fulbright lecturing assignments: in Romania, Hungary and Korea. He has refused to specialize decently, creating videos and writing articles and books on topics as remote from one another as Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and Arkansas movies. He's been a biographer twice, writing Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life and Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer. Two of his books, Our Own Sweet Sounds and Singing in Zion, are studies of Arkansas music. Two others deal with the arts — A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice and Come Walk With Me: The Art of Dorris Curtis. Cochran co-authored Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton with his spouse, Suzanne McCray.

Cochran has served as editor of the "Arkansas Character" series published by the University of Arkansas Press, writing introductions for Kelly Mulhollan's True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley and An Arkansas Florilegium: The Atlas of Botanist Edwin Smith Illustrated by Naturalist Kent Bonar and coauthoring the fourth book in the series, Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill, with Dale Carpenter.