General Sterling Price

Charles Portis's True Grit was serialised in The Saturday Evening Post across three issues in May and June 1968 before Simon and Schuster published the complete novel later that year. The book reached number 4 on the New York Times bestseller list and was widely praised for its narrator: fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, who recounts events of 1873 from the vantage of her late middle age, in a voice modelled on nineteenth-century Arkansas newspaper prose. The household tomcat General Sterling Price is named for the historical figure Sterling Price (1809 to 1867), who served as Governor of Missouri (1853 to 1857), as a Confederate major general commanding the Trans-Mississippi theatre, and after the Civil War as a self-exile in Carlota, Mexico, where he led a failed Confederate colonisation effort under Maximilian I. Mattie's naming of her cat after Price signals her unreconstructed political sympathies as the daughter of a Confederate veteran from Yell County, Arkansas. Henry Hathaway's 1969 Paramount adaptation cast John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, Kim Darby as Mattie, Glen Campbell as the Texas Ranger La Boeuf, and Robert Duvall as the outlaw Lucky Ned Pepper. Wayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 42nd ceremony in April 1970, his only competitive Oscar in a five-decade career. The cat appears briefly in the Hathaway version. The Coen Brothers remade the film in 2010 with Jeff Bridges as Cogburn, Hailee Steinfeld in her breakout role as Mattie, Matt Damon as La Boeuf, and Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney. The 2010 production paid closer attention to the novel's first-person framing and preserved more of Portis's nineteenth-century diction. The Coens' version grossed approximately 252 million USD worldwide on a 38 million USD budget, more than double the take of the Hathaway picture. Both films retain the detail that Mattie does not bring the cat with her on the journey; he remains in Yell County throughout.