Author of ‘country noir’ novels, such as Winter’s Bone, set in the rural communities of the Ozark mountains
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.
