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.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Katie Estill-Woodrell, said.
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 the attention from Hollywood, Mr. Woodrell did not become a public figure himself. Instead, he was an artist admired by close observers of contemporary fiction as a master storyteller of rural America.
In the early 2010s, Esquire described him as “one of American literature’s best-kept secrets,” and The New York Times said that he “writes about violence and dark deeds better than almost anyone in America today.”
Much as Mr. Woodrell was drawn to American archetypes — world-weary policemen, small-town crooks — reviewers continually praised his work for transcending the circumstances of any particular place or time. He gained command of Old Testament diction, and he sought out themes, like clan loyalty or murder or betrayal, used since ancient times.
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