NEW YORK – Shortly after moving back to his native Ozarks, novelist Daniel Woodrell realized that he might need to give his wife, who hails from Cleveland, a few social pointers. "You are going to go into the store and try to write a check to pay for the groceries," he recalls telling her. "And somebody is going to look at you and say, 'Who are your people?' I told her who to say – my grandparents. And her checks were always cleared."

The Ozarks are a mystery to many Americans, even to some who live there.

Tucked away in Missouri and Arkansas, stretching as far as Oklahoma and Kansas, it remains a world apart. Loggers and mining companies have had their fill, leaving behind a landscape devastated by exploitation yet determined not to die. Head deeper into the woods, and you will encounter people as stubborn as the scrub that grows on its rocky hills.

Despite the kudos his name imparts at the grocery store, Mr. Woodrell, who moved back home in the early 1990s, doesn't exactly qualify as local royalty.

"My mother's family is well-respected," says the 53-year-old novelist, whose new novel, Winter's Bone, is scheduled for release today. "But my father's line is more colorful."

Sitting in a conference room at his New York publisher, he describes how, soon after his homecoming, he ran up against these distinctions. The elderly proprietor of a dry-cleaning business asked him, "Are you kin to Alfred Woodrell?" When Mr. Woodrell admitted he was, the man replied, "Boy, he was a bad man with a bottle, wasn't he?"

This kind of reaction is something the heroine of Winter's Bone hears quite a bit. As the book opens, 16-year-old Ree Dolly's father has skipped bail and left town, with the family home as his collateral. If Ree doesn't find him fast, she, her two siblings and their mentally ill mother will be homeless.

Overnight, she becomes her father's bail bondsman, fearlessly visiting his rock-jawed cousins and methamphetamine-dealing business associates. They threaten her with guns and sexual violence. But she won't quit.

Thus, we arrive again in the Ozark underworld, which has been Mr. Woodrell's specialty for seven earlier books. From 1985's Under the Bright Lights to 1987's Civil War-set Woe to Live On (made into a movie called Ride the Devil by Ang Lee), he has given voice and depth to this region's violent souls, drug dealers and hard-drinking, hard-loving layabouts, not to mention the women who put up with them only so long before giving back as hard as they get.

Mr. Woodrell does not look like the sort of man who would know about drug labs and gun-toting woodsmen. Dressed in a black shirt, sipping a cup of coffee, he is shy and polite, small-boned. When asked about the motivation behind his latest book, his first reaction isn't to tell a story or to regale with tall tales of backwoods ways, but to talk about the poetry that he has been reading.

"I was actually under the sway of a bunch of British poets that I had never really dived into before," such as W.S. Graham, Mr. Woodrell says. "I came to see the kinship between the old Celtic culture in northern England and Yorkshire and whatnot and the Ozarks. It's roughly the same gene pool, and the topography is similar."

As Ree stumbles, trips and crabwalks her way across the land, Winter's Bone lingers elegantly and lushly on the woods around her. So much so that it gives us the impression it is these hills and valleys that have born Ree into the world, not her kin. Mr. Woodrell says this is not an accident.

"The language was really crucially important to me," he says. Having recently read Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, he wanted to use a similar kind of heightened form of expression to describe the world around Ree, to depict how it shapes the people who come from this place.

"You have to work hard to get a farmable crop in," Mr. Woodrell says. "And it takes generations to clear the rocks out of the pasture, and all that kind of thing. By and large, you are never too far ahead for most people."

Not surprisingly, the severity of Ozarks life has led some people to crime. Southern Missouri is constantly named the crank capital of the United States, partly because of bikers who rent rural houses to cook drugs, Mr. Woodrell says.

And now, selling, cooking, dealing and doing the drug is a way of life in his parts. "Seldom do a few days go by without an arrest or some sort of disaster about it in our little town paper," Mr. Woodrell says. "I've had neighbors who were cooking it. I've had neighbors who were dealing it. Some of 'em were pretty nice guys who need the money. Some of 'em are scum of the world."

William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor were huge influences on Mr. Woodrell as he grew up. When he went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, however, writers such as Raymond Chandler suddenly "felt like a tall drink of water" to him. "I remember sitting in a workshop, and this writer said to me, 'I really like this, but the first paragraph actually makes me want to keep reading. Should it be that easy to read?' "

That's when Mr. Woodrell realized he might be in an in-between place, a literary writer who believes in the imperative of story above all else.

Nowadays, he is regarded by some of the finest writers in the United States as an essential voice – everyone from Annie Proulx to Ron Hansen have sung his praises – and yet he is virtually unknown, an unfamiliar name except to a handful of very enthusiastic critics.

Mr. Woodrell seems comfortable with this. He feels lucky to be able to write for a living. "I was a disenchanted, alienated youth," Mr. Woodrell says. "I soon discovered that the only one thing I want to do is write. Which was sort of ridiculous. I had never even met a writer. I didn't know of any."

Mr. Woodrell's father, a metal salesman, always supported his son's notion of himself. Other family members, however, weren't so keen on it, he recalls.

"Even after I had published a couple of books, [my grandfather] said to me, 'I just can't respect a man who won't work, and I guess that writin' business beats working, don't it?' "

And yet, Mr. Woodrell has returned to his roots and plans to stay. The only problem remains that he often confronts material that is so rich in color that he cannot import it into his fiction. His town has a bail bondsman who would have been perfect for Winter's Bone. "She wears a leather vest, has a good deal of cleavage showing, and is tougher than hell!" he laughs.

But for every character like this, there is another who inspires Mr. Woodrell. For instance, 10 years ago, Mr. Woodrell watched a man try to run over his next-door neighbor, a young former prostitute, with his pickup.

"She was about 98 pounds and all sass," Mr. Woodrell remembers. "Anyway, I go over to ask her if she's OK and say I've called the cops, thinking maybe she will be grateful. And she just looks up at me and says, 'Why don't you take a picture. It will last longer!' "

John Freeman is a writer in New York.

Daniel Woodrell

(Little, Brown, $22.99)