Our Souls At Night

Alan Kent Haruf (1943-2014) was an American novelist known for his novels set in the fictional small town of Holt, Colorado. Holt is based on Yuma, Colorado, where Haruf lived for a while in the 1980s. Inspired by the works of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, Haruf opted to study literature in college and wanted to be a writer. Like the character of Louis Waters in Our Souls at Night, Haruf initially struggled to support his family as a writer, so he taught literature and writing before he achieved success and recognition. Haruf said of his early attempts at publication, “I sent the stories off to the big slick magazines and they all came back. But once in a great while, a rejection slip had a line or two from the editor, and I took each of these lines as encouragement and kept them in a special folder” (Haruf, Kent. “The Making of a Writer.” Granta, 29 Jan. 2020). Louis echoes this sentiment in Our Souls at Night when he tells Addie, “If I ever got anything from an editor, some word or phrase, I took that as encouragement and practically lived on it for months” (94).