Daniel Woodrell

The author of nine novels, Missouri native Daniel Woodrell is, to many, the literary ambassador to the Ozark mountains. Born in Springfield in 1953, Woodrell dropped out of high school at seventeen years old and enlisted in the Marines. He later attended the University of Kansas and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives and writes in West Plains, Missouri, a small Ozark Mountain town near the Arkansas border, and his family’s ancestral home. He is well-known in the literary community for his “country noir” novels, books heavily inspired by—according to the author himself—“Greek conceptions of storytelling and tragedy.” Five of his nine novels have been chosen as New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and his novel Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for the Novel in 1999.