Like “Norwood,” “True Grit” was first serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. And like “Norwood,” it was turned into a movie, twice — in 1969, with John Wayne in the Cogburn role (for which he received an Academy Award), and in 2010, starring Jeff Bridges and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. (“Norwood” became a movie in 1970 starring Mr. Portis’s fellow Arkansan Glen Campbell.)

Image Mr. Portis’s tale of the West became a best-seller and the basis of two movies. It was reissued in paperback before the release of the second film adaptation.

The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.

Mr. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned.

One of Mattie’s first impressions of Cogburn, who patrols the territory out of Fort Smith, is harsh. She finds him in bed at 10 o’clock in the morning, fully clothed and hung over.

“The brindle cat Sterling Price was curled up on the foot of the bed,” she says. “Rooster coughed and spit on the floor and rolled a cigarette and lit it and coughed some more. He asked me to bring him some coffee and I got a cup and took the eureka pot from the stove and did this. As he drank, little brown drops of coffee clung to his mustache like dew. Men will live like billy goats if they are let alone.”

The dialogue throughout has the same tone. In one scene Cogburn confronts four bandits across an open field:

“Lucky Ned Pepper said, ‘What is your intentions? Do you think one on four is a dogfall?’

“Rooster said, ‘I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker’s convenience! Which will you have?’

“Lucky Ned Pepper laughed. He said, ‘I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!’

“Rooster said, ‘Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!’ and he took the reins in his teeth and pulled the other saddle revolver and drove his spurs into the flanks of his strong horse Bo and charged directly at the bandits.”