The ballad is a musical and lyrical genre native to American popular culture that tells stories of love and loss, murder and betrayal. Ballads are sung by ordinary people, have a choral nature, and combine seemingly placid life with the emergence of death and tragedy. Ballad of Holt, of Kent Haruf (1943-2014), we find all this. As a Odyssey Inverted, Jack Burdette, an old and popular neighbor, former high school football star ("we had learned to expect unusual things from him"), returns one day to the town he had fled years before after having perpetrated a collective betrayal. This hated Ulysses is recognized – he is beaten and imprisoned – when he returns to Holt, his Ithaca, where his Penelope still lives. Now, Jessie is the partner of the voice that narrates the story, Pat Arbuckle, owner of the local newspaper.