Why a Booktrail?
1980s: Holt may be fictional in name but it is apparently based on Yuma Colorado – one of Haruf’s residences in the early 1980s.
1980s: Holt may be fictional in name but it is apparently based on Yuma Colorado – one of Haruf’s residences in the early 1980s.
Harold and Raymond McPheron are finally waving goodbye to their beloved Victoria, a young mother with a first chance at an education. Betty and Luther Wallace are struggling to keep their heads above water and their children out of care, and in the same town young friends Dena and DJ find solace away from their own troubled homes. As these stories unfold and entwine, tragedy strikes the McPheron household and life is thrown irrevocably off course.
Holt may be fictional in name but it is apparently based on Yuma Colorado – one of Haruf’s residences in the early 1980s.
Sometimes you just want to escape and get away from it all and the landscape of Holt/Yuma Colorado is the place to go. A small community in a small mid western town on flat barren land. In such a small place people know one another and as we get to know them, they come to live and bring the landscape with them off the page. The landscape is their home and they are tied to it – The grumpy farmers in particular were great characters to get to know – bachelors, brothers and struggling to live off the land. And the landscape is part of them all –
“Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.”
Destination : Colorado, Fictional “Holt” Author/Guide: Kent Haruf Departure Time: 2000s
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