Daniel Woodrell, the acclaimed author of “Winter’s Bone” and other American novels that captured the essence of the Missouri Ozarks he called home, died Friday.
The 72-year-old’s wife, Katie Estill-Woodrell, told the New York Times that he died at their home in West Plains, Missouri, after a battle against pancreatic cancer. He previously beat colon cancer in the early 2010s.
The celebrated author coined “country noir” as his own genre, which he described as “where quiet lives meet fierce consequences,” according to his X bio.
Woodrell was the last of his family to remain in the Missouri Ozarks, which served as inspiration for his storied literary collection. When he was a teenager, his family picked up and moved to Kansas City — which he despised because it was full of “raw dirt” with “no trees,” he told Guernica Magazine in 2013.
Seeking an escape, Woodrell tried to join the Navy during the Vietnam War, but told the magazine that “they were fully booked with all the dropouts they needed.” So, a Marine recruiter poached him, and he was soon stationed in Guam.
“This was the most combustible part of my life. All these ideas were new to me. I’d never heard of pacifism. I didn’t know about the idea of defying your government. I knew you could do that if you wanted to be a criminal, but I didn’t know you could do it on moral grounds. I learned,” Woodrell told the magazine.
In Guam, he served alongside “older jarheads” and performed experiments on different drugs. But the program was soon placed under investigation, and Woodrell volunteered for a drug amnesty program and left the Marines with a general discharge, the New York Times reported.
In a 2013 essay penned for The Atlantic, Woodrell explained that he traded two tacos for a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast” while hitchhiking through Tijuana post-discharge. He pored over the book almost in a trance and said he walked away with “a sense of vocation.”
His journeys eventually led him to the University of Kansas, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English. In his late 20s, he pivoted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned his master’s.
He met Estill-Woodrell, a fellow student, around that time. The pair married in 1984 and hopped around the West, South and Midwest before settling back in Woodrell’s native West Plains around 1996, the New York Times reported.
There, Woodrell would create “country noir” and its defining lineup, including “Winter’s Bone,” which was published in 2006.
“Winter’s Bone” was adapted into a critically acclaimed film in 2010, starring Jennifer Lawrence. Her gut-wrenching performance as Ree Dolly, an Ozarks teenager trying to track down her drug-dealing father, earned her the first of many Academy Award nominations for Best Actress.
Even with Hollywood hot on his heels, Woodrell made a point to stay true to himself, his self-defined genre and his Ozarks roots.
He credited much of his success to his ability to understand and have open “access to the mind of a criminal” over business hotshots like “IMB executives.”
“These are my kin,” he told Esquire in 2013.
Woodrell sought to invite his audiences into the Ozarks’ “country noir” reality and his home as he knew it — even when tormented by neighboring “tweakers,” as he explained to the magazine.
“I came back when I’d had a taste of other places and realized that I would never feel the same sense of connection to any place other than the Ozarks,” Woodrell said.
Woodrell was born on March 4, 1953, in Springfield, Missouri, to Jeananne and Robert Woodrell. His mother was a registered nurse, while his father worked as a wholesale metal dealer.
He is survived by his wife and brother, Ted Woodrell.
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