By Steve Paul
This week we received the devastating news that Daniel Woodrell, the Missouri-based author of a superb series of novels produced over the last forty years, had died of pancreatic cancer. He was a mere 72. I regret even more that last March, when we were traveling to a conference in Alabama I failed to make an advance connection with him and I missed an opportunity to get together while passing through West Plains, MO. His reply to me at the time, included this: “I finally started reading Connell seriously and geez he's got it all.” I know we had crossed paths when I was working on my biography of Evan S. Connell, and I’m glad he got the urge to read more of Connell’s work.
I knew I’d written about Connell a few times over the years, and I was heartened to unearth some of those pieces. He would have come on my radar circa 1987 when, as book review editor at the KC Star, I assigned his civil war novel to another fine writer with a western bent, the late Lenore Carroll. My first interview with him occurred about five years later, in 1992.
I was pretty sure I’d reviewed the fabulous Winter’s Bone but I’d forgot that I paired that with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. So that one turned out to be an interesting read and memory jolt. I’m not prone to quoting myself, but 20 years later I felt somewhat good about this piece: “Woodrell lives in the hills and absorbs their currents. He captures the acts and language of the disenfranchised, the downtordden, the mischievous. his characters tend to be aggressively anti-social or behavioral screw-ups, ‘scornful of town law and town ways, clinging to their own.’”
Two years after the novel came out, I used Winter’s Bone in a class I was teaching at Knox College, and I was surprised when the students turned out to be less enthusiastic about it than I was. Probably a combination of their rich-kid privilege and my lousy teaching. No big deal. But I also loved the movie version, wowed by its faithfulness to Woodrell’s story and the absolutely stunning presence of Jennifer Lawrence in the starring role as Ree Dolly.
I was also happy to be reminded that I heaped praise on Daniel’s later novel, The Maid’s Version, a remarkable example of his ability to mine and transform real, historic events from his native state’s hidden corners.
When I was putting together the short-story collection Kansas City Noir something like 14 years ago, i was eager to include Daniel. My recollection is his entry came very late in the process, but he was such a meticulous writer and his story, Come Murder Me Next, Babe, was so eerily fine (based on another true-crime tale), I didn’t care. If you’re looking for an entry point into Daniel’s work, you could start there and quickly move on to Winter’s Bone.
Each of the reproductions below come from the pages of The Kansas City Star — from 1987, 1992, 2006, 2013.
