Author Daniel Woodrell has died. Photo / Getty Images
Daniel Woodrell, a much-admired novelist who coined the term “country noir” for his bleak rural crime fiction often set in his native Missouri Ozarks, has died.
He was 72.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Katie Estill-Woodrell.
Woodrell was widely recognised for Winter’s Bone, a gritty 2006 novel about a teenage girl in the rural Ozarks who must track down her missing father, out on bail after a meth charge, to save her family from eviction. The novel was adapted into a 2010 film of the same name, which featured Jennifer Lawrence in her breakthrough role and received four Academy Award nominations.
Rural Missouri formed the backdrop of many of Woodrell’s works. He captured its rugged landscapes and harsh exacting way of life with an eye for detail and ear for regional language that aligned with his upbringing in the state.
Woodrell described his style as “country noir”, a term he applied to his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss. Told through the voice of Doyle Redmond, a Missouri writer who pronounces himself “a somewhat educated hillbilly who keeps his diction stunted down out of crippling allegiance to his roots”, the novel told a morally ambiguous story of crime, family and homegrown marijuana.
“Woodrell knows deeply the subjects he writes on,” novelist Pinckney Benedict wrote in a review for the Washington Post.
“He knows the voices of his people, and he never sounds a false or condescending note. There is on every page the evidence of an abiding weakness for the intriguing or telling or surprising moment of vocabulary.”
Woodrell’s follow-up, Tomato Red (1998), followed a drifter drawn into the crime-driven lives of a pair of teenage siblings in a struggling community and was adapted into a 2017 film starring Julia Garner. One of his earlier novels, Woe to Live On (1987), was adapted into Ang Lee’s 1999 film Ride With the Devil, a Civil War-era western featuring Tobey Maguire.
Reflecting on his craft in a 2013 interview with Guernica magazine, Woodrell said: “I don’t see any reason to be coy about wanting the reader to keep reading. The bardic tradition and others have influenced my thinking about that. … If I can get you to read at all, I like to keep you reading.”
Daniel Stanford Woodrell was born in Springfield, Missouri, on March 4, 1953. A high school dropout, he joined the Marines at 17 and was stationed in Guam in the early 1970s. He later earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Kansas and received a master’s from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
In addition to his wife, a fellow writer whom he married in 1984, survivors include a brother.
Woodrell once hosted Anthony Bourdain for an episode of the food and travel show No Reservations, and he broke his shoulder on camera while the two were fishing in the Ozarks.
“I couldn’t think of a better tour guide,” Bourdain said of Woodrell. “In the same way that, say, George Pelecanos owns DC, Woodrell owns the Ozarks, and nobody should even bother writing about the place after he’s done it.”
Speaking of his deep connection to the Ozarks, a region historically associated with outlaws, outcasts and other misfits, Woodrell told Esquire in 2013: “There’s a reason I’ve got better access to the mind of a criminal than the mind of an IBM executive. These are my kin.”
He died at his home in West Plains, Missouri, on November 28.
Niha Masih is a reporter at the Washington Post’s Seoul hub, where she covers breaking news in the United States and across the world. Harrison Smith contributed to this report.
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