The story is adapted from a best selling 1968 novel by Charles Portis, who was a longtime journalist from Arkansas, where the first part of the film takes place. He was a reporter in New York and London, and covered the the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

True Grit was originally published as magazine serial. I would imagine that most reviewers of the time considered the plot, characters, and quality of the writing and filming to be the main interest among their readers, rather than some left wing political analysis.

I taught the book in high school summer school English 11 a couple of years. It's short and really quite funny, and of course then you show the kids the movie after they read it. Being tough and manly was a quality neccessary to live and prosper in that place and in those days, because life was much harder than it is now. MATTIE is tough and manly, because she wants to see Chaney swing for killing her dad, and stops at nothing to accompish that. She is the main character in the book and movies by the way, not Rooster. The Cohen brothers movie better establishes that, the actress Hallie Steinfeild is incredible, and it is thus a better film. Portis based Mattie on newspaper stringers he worked with in deepest Arkansas.