Winter’s Bone Author Daniel Woodrell Dies at 72

Daniel Woodrell, who coined the term “country noir” to describe his subgenre of desperate circumstances in rural America, has died. He was 72. His wife, Katie Estill-Woodrell, told the New York Times that he died at their home in West Plains, Missouri. Woodrell had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He’d previously had colon cancer in the 2010s, which had gone into remission. Woodrell wrote Winter’s Bone in 2006, about a teen girl in the Missouri Ozarks looking for her missing father. The 2010 film adaptation launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence.

Woodrell was born in Springfield, Missouri in 1953. He joined the Marines after dropping out of high school. “At that age, I had never questioned the fact that, if there was a war, I’d be expected to go to it. It just didn’t come up in my family background,” he told Guernica in 2013. “It was only after I joined that I began to hear contrary notions. 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 got his bachelor’s from the University of Kansas, and from there an MA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Around that time, he met Estill-Woodrell. The two eventually settled in the Ozarks. Woodrell published his first novel, Under the Bright Lights, in 1986. In 1999, his book Woe to Live On was adapted into Ride with the Devil by Ang Lee. Winter’s Bone then came in 2010, and Tomato Red in 2017. At the 2011 Academy Awards, Winter’s Bone was nominated in four categories — including Best Picture, Best Actress for Jennifer Lawrence, and Best Supporting Actor for John Hawkes.

Jennifer Lawrence told Vulture in 2010 that director Debra Granik gave out “hundreds of copies” of Woodrell’s book while filming on location, “so they’d understand that we weren’t there to mock them or to portray them in a negative light. We were basically shooting a movie about a girl who happens to live there. If you think about it, in the movie, these characters aren’t really made into heroes or villains, really. It’s just true.”