Discussed in this essay:

Collected Works, by Charles Portis. Library of America. 1,105 pages. $45.

Not long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a rare invitation to “Her Majesty’s Afternoon Party,” he found himself in a one-bedroom apartment getting summarily hammered with a group of foreign correspondents. Portis was by then mostly inured to the aura of celebrity. Born in 1933, he’d been raised along the southern border of Arkansas, in that region one of his narrators calls “the Arklatex”—where Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas converge—before serving in the Korean War.…