Keeping tabs on authors in LINKcat: Daniel Woodrell

 

LINKcat

New York Times, 11/30/2025

Alex Traub reports:

Mr. Woodrell was best known for his 2006 novel, “Winter’s Bone,” which became an acclaimed, Oscar-nominated movie four years later. A teenage Jennifer Lawrence starred as Ree Dolly, a girl in rural Missouri whose family home will be seized unless she finds her father, a meth cook on the lam. 

Two more of Mr. Woodrell’s novels were adapted as films: “Woe to Live On” (1987), which became “Ride With the Devil” (1999), directed by Ang Lee, and “Tomato Red” (1998), which in 2017 became a movie of the same title starring Julia Garner. 

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. 

Esquire magazine described him in the early 2010s as “one of American literature’s best-kept secrets.” The author Donald Ray Pollock, writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2012, declared that Mr. Woodrell “writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today.”

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