Daniel Woodrell, who was "known for prose as rugged and elemental as the igneous rock of the Ozark Mountains, his birthplace, which he returned to just as his artistic craftsmanship peaked," died November 28, the New York Times reported. He was 72. Woodrell was best known for his novel Winter's Bone (2006), which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly, "a girl in rural Missouri whose family home will be seized unless she finds her father, a meth cook on the lam."
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| Daniel Woodrell | |
Two more of his novels were adapted as films: Woe to Live On (1987), which became Ride With the Devil (1999), directed by Ang Lee; and Tomato Red (1998), a 2017 movie starring Julia Garner. Woodrell's other books include Give Us a Kiss (1996), The Death of Sweet Mister (2001), and The Maid's Version (2013).
Despite the attention from Hollywood, Woodrell "did not become a public figure himself. Instead, he was an artist admired by close observers of contemporary fiction as a master storyteller of rural America," the Times noted. In the early 2010s, Esquire described him as "one of American literature's best-kept secrets," and the Times said he "writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today."
"He writes high Greek tragedy about low people, and he never panders or looks down on the people he writes about," author Dennis Lehane told Esquire. "As a prose stylist, he's done what all the best do: taken the regional voice of the world he writes about and turned it into poetry."
Woodrell considered his novels "country noir," which he described in a 1994 Times article as portraying "the allegedly folksy and bucolic heartland as the frequently rude and savage and dark world those of us who've done our time there know it can be is to explode a happy myth of fantasy-America."
After serving in the military during the Vietnam era, Woodrell "took to hitchhiking with his military duffel and landed in Tijuana," the Times wrote. While eating street tacos, he was approached by "a scruffy young man" who offered to trade a copy of Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast for his last two tacos. Woodrell made the trade and went on to "read the book feverishly, not sleeping."
In Hemingway's descriptions of becoming a writer, Woodrell discovered, as he later recalled in an essay in the Atlantic, "a sense of vocation.... I needed very much to devote myself to something demanding, something I would give everything to all the while knowing my everything might not be enough." He earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Kansas in his late 20s and then a master's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Woodrell once told Esquire that the Ozarks "were a place to mind your own business, go off the grid, avoid the law, hide." In an Associated Press piece, he said that he was the last of his family still in West Plains, Mo., but was reluctant to move: "There are a lot of things you can hear in the air that you can't read. About half the stories are anecdotes I heard around town."