Utterly charming distilled to elemental purity. Our Souls at Night is already creating a stir. novel runs on the dogged insistence that simple elements carry depths, and readers will find much to be grateful for. His great subject was the struggle of decency against small-mindedness, and his rare gift was to make sheer decency a moving subject. Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it "a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect."ġ999 - Finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for PlainsongĢ005 - Finalist for the Book Sense Award for EventideĢ014 - Folio Prize shortlist for Benediction Our Souls at Night, his final work, was published posthumously in 2015 and received wide praise. On November 30, 2014, at the age of 71, Kent Haruf died at his home in Salida, Colorado, of interstitial lung disease. Library Journal described the writing as "honest storytelling that is compelling and rings true." Jonathan Miles saw it as a "repeat performance" and "too goodhearted." The New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg called it "a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader." Plainsong won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.Įventide, a sequel to Plainsong, was published in 2004. Plainsong was published in 1999 and became a U.S. A number of his short stories have appeared in literary magazines. Where You Once Belonged followed in 1990. His first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a Whiting Award and a special Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. He had three daughters from his first marriage.Īll of Haruf's novels take place in the fictional town of Holt, in eastern Colorado, a town based on Yuma, Colorado, one of Haruf's residences in the early 1980s. He lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado until his death in 2014. He graduated with a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, where he would later teach, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.īefore becoming a writer, Haruf worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, as an English teacher with the Peace Corps in Turkey, and colleges in Nebraska and Illinois. Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of a Methodist minister. Education-B.A., Nebraska Wesleyan University M.F.A., Iowa Writers' WorkshopĪlan Kent Haruf was an American novelist and author of six novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.Their brave adventures-their pleasures and their difficulties-are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer’s enduring contribution to American literature. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with.
Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.
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