Like William Faulkner before him, Kent Haruf has created a world out of a single fictionalized geographic region. For Faulkner it was mythical Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi; for Haruf it is Holt County, located on the high plains of northeastern Colorado. There Haruf, son of a Methodist minister and born and raised in the same flatlands, has set three award-winning novels: The Tie That Binds, Where Once You Belonged, and Plainsong. Haruf's novels tell of simple working people, residents of a land where--as with Raymond Carver's fictional characters--things will probably get worse before they get better. Haruf's characters struggle and yearn and face life head-on, but in the end are disappointed as often as they are redeemed.

Haruf's career path to his long-time ambition of writing was a slow and convoluted one, involving attendance at several universities, a stint in the Peace Corps in Turkey, and numerous odd...