Daniel Woodrell
American novelist
Daniel Stanford Woodrell (March 4, 1953 – November 28, 2025) was an American novelist and short story writer who wrote nine novels, most of them set in the Missouri Ozarks, and one collection of short stories. Woodrell coined the phrase "country noir" to describe his 1996 novel Give Us a Kiss. Reviewers have frequently since used the term to categorize his writing.
Early life and education
Woodrell was born in Springfield, Missouri, in the southwestern corner of the state. He grew up in Missouri and dropped out of high school to join the Marines. Later he earned a BA from the University of Kansas and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The University of Missouri–Kansas City awarded an honorary doctorate to Daniel Woodrell on December 17, 2016.
Career
Woodrell has set most of his novels in the Missouri Ozarks, a landscape he knew from childhood. He has created novels based on crime, a style he termed "country noir", a phrase adopted by commentators on his work. However, William Michael Boyle, an avowed fan and fellow author of literary crime fiction, put Woodrell's work in broader context: "this Woodrell guy's got double of everything.
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This entry incorporates text from “Daniel Woodrell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.