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Plainsong
by Kent Haruf
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Reading Club Session: 19 February 2020
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Plainsong tells the story of multiple characters living in or near a small town in rural Colorado. Tom Guthrie and his two young sons, Ike and Bobby, try to cope with abandonment by their wife and mother. Victoria Roubideaux is a seventeen-year-old woman from an impoverished background who discovers she is pregnant. Harold and Raymond McPheron are two elderly bachelors who find themselves helping Victoria. These characters and others interact in an effort to live and find happiness in a small town.
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Questions for discussion
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Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of a Methodist minister. He graduated with a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, where he would later teach, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.
Before becoming a writer, Haruf worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, as an English teacher with the Peace Corps in Turkey, and colleges in Nebraska and Illinois.
He lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado until his death in 2014. He had three daughters from his first marriage.
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