Portis's literary forebears are Cervantes, Thomas Nashe (Jack Wilkie of Dog of the South is another unfortunate traveler like Nashe's Jack Wilton in The Unfortunate Traveler, 1594), Voltaire, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Johnson J. Hooper, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor. There is also more than a dash of Henry Fielding, Ring Lardner, and Sinclair Lewis in Portis's background. In short, his favorite mode is comic, and he favors "white" comedy over black. Even though True Grit owes much to the comic tradition represented by the writers just listed, Portis draws upon the traditions of the epic, the legend, the tall tale, and the bildungsroman in creating Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn and establishing a quest for them to undergo. Their tests and their character traits ultimately come to represent the ordeal of a nation rapidly expanding its frontiers while trying to redefine its civil...