Kent Haruf

Feb. 24, 1943 – Nov. 30, 2014

NEW YORK – Kent Haruf pulled a wool cap over his eyes when he sat down at his manual typewriter each morning so he could "write blind," fully immersing himself in the fictitious small town in eastern Colorado where he set a series of quiet, acclaimed novels, including "Plainsong," a 1999 best seller.

Haruf often wrote a chapter a day, most recently in a prefabricated shed in the backyard of his home in Salida, Colo., where he died Sunday at 71.

Punctuation, capitalization, paragraphs – they waited for the second draft. The first draft usually came quickly, a stream of imagery and dialogue that ran to the margins, single-spaced.

The ring of the return oriented him, as did the world he saw in his mind's eye: the community he called Holt, a composite of towns in Colorado where he had lived as a boy. His father was a Methodist minister, and the family moved often.

"Plainsong" describes the interlocking lives of several families: aging brothers, a pregnant teenager they take in, young boys whose mother suffers from depression. It was the first book he wrote using his distinctive regimen – he produced much of it in the summers while he taught at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale – and he spent six years writing it. Critics praised his spare sentences and the depth and believability of his characters and their circumstances.

Writing in Newsweek, Jeff Giles called the book "a moving look at our capacity for both pointless cruelty and simple decency, our ability to walk out of the wreckage of one family and build a stronger one where it used to stand."

"Plainsong" made Haruf something of an overnight sensation, although he was 56 at the time and had been writing for decades.

He was rejected when he first applied to the Iowa Writers' Workshop in his 20s and when he sent early stories and novels to publishers. After several years he was accepted at the Writers' Workshop; its overseers relented when they learned that he had moved his family to Iowa City, determined to enroll.

More rejection awaited, but he eventually broke through. He published his first novel, "The Tie That Binds," about a woman who gives up her chance for love to care for her father, in 1984. Six years later he wrote "Where You Once Belonged," about a football hero turned criminal.

His first two books brought critical respect but few readers. "Plainsong" brought both, settling in on best-seller lists in both hardcover and paperback and being named a finalist for the National Book Award. It was made into a television movie in 2004.

In 2004 he published "Eventide," which focused on some of the same characters as "Plainsong." Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said that it had "the whiff of the formulaic" but that "Mr. Haruf makes us care about these plain-spoken small-town folks without ever resorting to sentimentality or clichés."

Nine years later he wrote "Benediction," also set in Holt. It was a finalist for the inaugural Folio Prize, awarded by the Folio Society in Britain. In May 2015 his publisher, Knopf, is scheduled to release his novel "Our Souls at Night," which Haruf finished this summer.

– New York Times