Daniel Woodrell, a novelist 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 on Friday at his home in West Plains, Mo. He was 72.
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Despite Hollywood’s attention to his books, Mr. Woodrell himself did not become much of a public figure; he remained primarily known within the smaller circles of close observers of contemporary fiction, where he was admired as a master storyteller of rural America.
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Much as Mr. Woodrell was drawn to American archetypes — world-weary policemen, small-town crooks — reviewers praised his work for transcending the circumstances of any place or time. He gained command of Old Testament diction, and he sought out themes, like clan loyalty or murder or betrayal, that had been explored since ancient times.
“He writes high Greek tragedy about low people, and he never panders or looks down on the people he writes about,” the writer 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.”
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Frustrated with labels used to characterize his style, Mr. Woodrell coined one of his own: “country noir.” In a 1994 Times Book Review article, he defined this fictional strategy: “To portray 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.”
Interesting how many themes of this obituary echo those of my prior post, also about how rural America shows up in wider cultural tropes.
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