University of Arkansas

University of Arkansas mainly at Fayetteville; land-grant and state supported; coeducational; chartered 1871, opened 1872; called Arkansas Industrial Univ. until 1899. The Univ. of Arkansas for Medical Sciences is at Little Rock. Additional campuses are located at Monticello and Pine Bluff.

Portis, Charles [Mccoll] (1929–), novelist born in Arkansas, educated at the University of Arkansas, and a resident of Little Rock. After a hitch in the Marines and a career as reporter and London correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, Portis published Norwood (1966), a novel about a Kerouac‐like crosscountry journey, with high humor in a South‐ern accent. But it was his next book, True Grit (1968), that established him as an original comic voice. It has as narrator a 14‐year‐old girl seeking vengeance against her father's killer. She chooses for her instrument one Rooster Cogburn, a Falstaffian marshal possessing “true grit.” Both characters are memorable. The Dog of the South (1979) is a quest by the narrator to find the wife who took his car, her trail festooned by charges to his credit cards all the way to Mexico. Gringos (1991) features an expatriate American in Mexico and Guatemala and his picaresque adventures.