Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday, February 6, 2016, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell

Paraphrased from Wikipedia:

Daniel Woodrell was born March 4, 1953, in Springfield, Missouri. 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.

He lives in West Plains, Missouri, in the Ozarks (AKA "West Table, Missouri, in his novels), and is married to the novelist Katie Estill
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Woodrell has set most of his eight novels in the Missouri Ozarks, a landscape which he knew from childhood. He has created novels based on crime, a style he termed "country noir", a phrase which has been adopted by commentators on his work.

In addition to finding readers for his fiction, Woodrell has had two novels adapted for films. Woodrell's second novel, Woe to Live On (1987), was adapted for the 1999 film Ride with the Devil, directed by Ang Lee.

The more recent Winter's Bone (2006) was adapted by writer and director Debra Granik for a film of the same title, released commercially in June 2010 after winning two awards at the Sundance Film Festival, including the Grand Jury Prize for a dramatic film.Several critics called it one of the best films of the year and an American classic, and it received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

In the interview video below, Daniel Woodrell talks briefly about The Maid's Version and about drawing inspiration for his writing from the people and environs of the Missouri Ozarks.



In the above  interview, Woodrell mentions that the West Table dance hall explosion of 1929 was based on a real dance hall explosion, which took place in West Plains in 1928 and continues to be remembered and memorialized to this day. There are also numerous websites dedicated to keeping the memory of the dead alive. One of the most informative is an archival page from Howell County with newspaper articles of the day chronicling the event. A nonfiction history has also been written by Lin Waterhouse, and she has set up a Facebook page about  her book and about remembering the dead.