Kent Haruf

Alan Kent Haruf (/hɛrɪf/, rhymes with sheriff; February 24, 1943 – November 30, 2014) was an American writer. Born and raised in Colorado, Haruf attended Nebraska Wesleyan University and also received a master's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Nevertheless, Haruf struggled to find success as a writer. He spent years teaching English at the high school and college level, in addition to stints as a janitor, construction worker, and farmhand. Haruf's first works accepted for publication came at age 41, in 1984, and he ultimately published six novels and a number of short stories. All of his works were set on the High Plains of Colorado, mostly in the fictional town of Holt. Although his first two novels, released in 1984 and 1990, received critical praise, commercial success eluded Haruf until the publication of Plainsong in 1999, which gained wide recognition and bestseller status. He followed it up with two sequels, Eventide (2005) and Benediction (2013).

Throughout his career, critics praised his authentic portrayals of rural life, his spare and elegant prose, and his attention to the beauty found in ordinary things, although he was occasionally criticized for redundancy. In early 2014, Haruf was diagnosed with an incurable lung disease and wrote his final book, Our Souls At Night, while ill; he died that November. The book was published posthumously and adapted into a film. 5280, a Denver magazine, wrote in 2015 that Haruf is "widely considered [to be] Colorado's finest novelist", while the Dublin Review of Books called him "one of America's finest writers ... both uniquely American and profoundly universal."