The Pryor Center Presents lecture series presented by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences continues at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 1, with "Another Border Trilogy: Portis After True Grit," with Robert Cochran, professor of English and director of the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies at the U of A.

Cochran's most recent book, Haunted Man's Report: Reading Charles Portis, is a study of the writings of Arkansas writer Charles Portis, most celebrated for the astounding success of True Grit but more recently riding a wave centered on the reprinting of all five of his novels in the gold-standard Library of America series.

True Grit, for all its deserved preeminence, is an outlier among Portis novels. The second of his five, it was followed by three others — The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985) and Gringos (1991) — which share sufficient elements of locale and structure to make them coherently approachable as a unit.

"There are Portis fans who have great admiration for all these books," Cochran says. "I'm one of these. There are even a few who've lamented the great success of True Grit as casting them into its shadow. I'm not one of those. They'll find their audiences."

Cochran won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 and has been awarded three Fulbright lecturing assignments: in Romania, Hungary and Korea. He has refused to specialize decently, creating videos and writing articles and books on topics as remote from one another as Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and Arkansas movies. He's been a biographer twice, writing Vance Randolph: An Ozark Life and Louise Pound: Scholar, Athlete, Feminist Pioneer. Two of his books, Our Own Sweet Sounds and Singing in Zion, are studies of Arkansas music. Two others deal with the arts — A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice and Come Walk With Me: The Art of Dorris Curtis. Cochran co-authored Lights! Camera! Arkansas!: From Broncho Billy to Billy Bob Thornton with his spouse, Suzanne McCray.

Cochran has served as editor of the "Arkansas Character" series published by the University of Arkansas Press, writing introductions for Kelly Mulhollan's True Faith, True Light: The Devotional Art of Ed Stilley and An Arkansas Florilegium: The Atlas of Botanist Edwin Smith Illustrated by Naturalist Kent Bonar and coauthoring the fourth book in the series, Reporting for Arkansas: The Documentary Films of Jack Hill, with Dale Carpenter.

Pearl's Books will have copies of Haunted Man's Report available for sale at the event.

The Pryor Center is located at 1 E. Center St., Suite 120. The event is free and open to the public, and parking is available on the Fayetteville Square.

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About the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History: The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History is an oral history program with the mission to document the history of Arkansas through the collection of spoken memories and visual records, preserve the collection in perpetuity, and connect Arkansans and the world to the collection through the Internet, TV broadcasts, educational programs, and other means. The Pryor Center records audio and video interviews about Arkansas history and culture, collects other organizations' recordings, organizes these recordings into an archive, and provides public access to the archive, primarily through the website at pryorcenter.uark.edu. The Pryor Center is the state's only oral and visual history program with a statewide, seventy-five county mission to collect, preserve, and share audio and moving image recordings of Arkansas history.

About the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences: The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is the largest and most academically diverse unit on campus with three schools, 16 departments and 43 academic programs and research centers. The college provides the majority of the core curriculum for all University of Arkansas students.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $2.2 billion to Arkansas' economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research News.