![]() ![]() Norwood comes into contact with a variety of unusual people on the way to New York and back, including ex-circus midget Edmund Ratner ("the world’s smallest perfect fat man"), Joann ("the college educated chicken"), and Rita Lee, a girl Norwood woos and wins on the bus ride back to the South. Based in the mid-1950s, the novel’s plot revolves around Norwood Pratt, a young, naïve, goodhearted ex-Marine living in Ralph, Texas, who is persuaded by con-man Grady Fring (the first of several such characters inhabiting Portis’s novels) to transport a pair of automobiles to New York City. His first novel, Norwood (1966), established his preference for travel narratives with deadpan dialogue combined with amusing observations on American culture. After serving a year as a reporter and the London bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune, he left journalism in 1964, returned to Arkansas, and began writing fiction full-time. ![]() His work for the New York Herald Tribune allowed him to return to the South on many occasions to cover civil rights-related stories. ![]() He worked for four years at the New York Herald-Tribune. After he graduated, he worked for various newspapers as a reporter, including almost two years at the Arkansas Gazette, for which he wrote the "Our Town" column. He began his career in journalism while in school, writing for both the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville student newspaper, Arkansas Traveler, and the Northwest Arkansas Times. ![]()
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