Daniel Woodrell, who has died aged 72, needed to leave home in order to become a writer. But it was when he came back to the Ozark mountains of Missouri that he wrote the books that ensured his place among the very finest American writers of the past half century. Constitutionally unable to fit into to any literary scene, Woodrell invented, and perfectly exemplified, a genre of his own – what he called “country noir”.
The first three books he wrote after his return – Tomato Red (1998), The Death of Sweet Mister (2001) and, above all, Winter’s Bone (2006) – are American classics. These are stories of poor, white, rural lives that are full of the kind of incidents you might expect to find in a crime novel, but given depth and weight and rendered in a language so rich and singular as to dignify every one of these struggling souls.
Woodrell’s particular genius – no doubt rooted in his childhood love of Mark Twain – was for writing teenage characters stuck in unbearable situations and looking for a way out. There are the outré siblings Jamalee and Jason in Tomato Red, the heart-rending 13-year-old boy called Shug in The Death of Sweet Mister, and 16-year-old Ree, the indelible heroine of Winter’s Bone.
Woodrell knew something about difficult childhoods. One of the three sons of Jeananne, a nurse, and Robert Lee, a metal dealer, he was born in Springfield, and spent his first years in West Plains, but his family soon moved across Missouri to St Charles, a tough river town. His early years were marred by chronic intestinal problems that carried on until he was operated on, aged 12.
During his convalescence he really started to read – Robert Louis Stevenson and his mother’s favourite, Twain. When he was 15 the family moved west to Kansas City. The teenage Woodrell hated suburbia: so much so that, as soon as he turned 17, he signed up for the Marines, knowing that he might be sent to Vietnam.
In fact he ended up doing guard duty on the Pacific island of Guam, where he fell in with older soldiers who had spent time in Vietnam and acquired exotic drug habits along the way. Woodrell partook enthusiastically and after 18 months he was discharged for “antisocial tendencies”. Back in the US he decided to go to college, funded by the GI Bill. At Kansas University he started to write short stories. He won a couple of prizes and was accepted on to the well-regarded creative writing programme at Iowa University. Still an ornery individual, Woodrell did not get on with his teachers particularly well, but did find kindred souls among his fellow students; including his future wife, Katie Estill, and the Welsh novelist Russell Celyn Jones.
Success did not come quickly. At Iowa he had written a short story set during the civil war in the contested territory of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write it as a novel, but felt he wasn’t ready, so embarked on a crime novel instead. He found an agent for it, but the book took so long to sell that, by then, he had moved several times without leaving a forwarding address, which meant it was some while before he received the good news.
What he did not realise was that he would immediately be pigeonholed as a crime writer. The first novel, Under the Bright Lights (1986), was an excellent, offbeat detective story set in the fictional river town of St Bruno. However, the two sequels, Muscle for the Wing (1988) and The Ones You Do (1992), are his least successful books, full of nice scenes and characters, but evidently written more for the marketplace than the heart. In between he did manage to finish his civil war novel, a bleak and brutal western called Woe to Live On, but it was published with minimal enthusiasm in 1987. So it was something of a miracle when, years later, Ang Lee bought the rights and filmed it as Ride With the Devil (1999).
Meanwhile there were some hard times. Woodrell’s books were not selling and Katie, whom he had married in 1984, had yet to find a publisher for her work. While living in San Francisco, and in a mood of desperation, Woodrell wrote the book that would begin a sea change in his fortunes. Give Us a Kiss (1996) is the story of an Ozark writer, down on his luck, returning to his home town and getting caught up in all sorts of bad business. It was his best book yet and one that pointed him in the right direction. It was time to return home.
They moved back to West Plains and Woodrell settled into the most productive writing period of his life. The film deal allowed them to buy a house of their own for the first time. Then came the three great novels, culminating in Winter’s Bone, which was turned into a 2010 film that, for once, approached the quality of its source material (and introduced the world to the talent of Jennifer Lawrence in the role of Ree). Tomato Red was also adapted for film, in 2017. Meanwhile Katie too finally became a published author.
Visiting them there in 2005, I soon realised that West Plains was the real deal: no country idyll but a characterful scuffed-up rural backwater in the Ozark foothills. It lacked a decent restaurant, or a bar you would enter without watching your back, but provided no end of material for a writer with Woodrell’s particular gifts.
After Winter’s Bone, there would be a collection of short stories, The Outlaw Album (2011) and one more historical novel, The Maid’s Version (2013). There should have been much more, but the intestines that had plagued Woodrell as a child let him down again. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in about 2010, and after a period of remission he died from pancreatic cancer.
Katie and his brother, Ted, survive him.
• Daniel Woodrell, writer, born 4 March 1953; died 28 November 2025
