There are charming incidents of daily life in Fort Smith: The buildings are made of fieldstone and all the windows need washing. They have that big wide street there called Garrison Avenue like places out in the west.
The accidents of the story are clean and solid: the plot is lively, the painting of Fort Smith vivid: Rather, let’s stick to the book and ask why it has been so popular so long. Actually, both films were about equally faithful to the book, and, although on most points (acting, photography, moral gravity) the later film is superior, it did not have John Wayne, so call it a draw. Let us not here debate how the famous movie from 1969 (the one with John Wayne) compares to the 2010 version (with Jeff Bridges), although that is a very pleasant thing to chew over. When something lasts that long and is held to the hearts of so many people, it is worth a little thinking on. Not the literary canon as found, for example in the New York Review of Books, but that which includes works such as Gone with the Wind, Catcher in the Rye, Catch 22, perhaps The Color Purple, and certainly To Kill a Mockingbird. Over the forty-five years since, this novel has joined a small list of novels that could be called the popular American canon. This is the essence of True Grit, a novel by Charles Portis published in 1968, and filmed twice.
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