Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer-winning author who turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers, dies aged 80 | Books
Tracy Kidder, the award-winning nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80 years old.
Random House, Kidder’s longtime publisher, confirmed her death in a statement Wednesday: “Tracy’s storytelling and tireless reporting talents are a lasting reflection of the empathy, integrity, and endless curiosity she brought to everything she did.”
Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1981 work The Soul of a New Machine, which examined the workings of a new computer company long before most people were interested in the inner workings of Silicon Valley.
“It was like going to another country,” Kidder told The Associated Press at the time. “At first I didn’t understand what anyone was saying.”
Over the following decades, Kidder delved into previously unfamiliar worlds and produced richly researched books on subjects that might not sound easy to read.
In 1989’s Among the Schoolchildren, she highlighted the dedication of an inner-city teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts, who spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom. Later, in 1993’s Old Friends, he observed the dark side of aging in America while also describing how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their disabilities.
Turning these events at a nursing home in Northampton, Massachusetts, into a coherent narrative was one of his biggest challenges, Kidder told the AP.
“A lot of things don’t happen, and yet when you read you feel like a lot happens. The little things are supposed to matter a lot,” he said.
In 2003, Kidder wrote Mountains Beyond the Mountains, about a doctor’s effort to bring health care to Haiti. This work introduced Kidder’s work to a new generation of readers, with many universities adding it to their reading lists.
“Mountains Beyond the Mountains changed my life and the lives of so many others around the world,” John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, wrote on social media Wednesday.
The book even inspired indie rock band Arcade Fire’s 2010 hit Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).
Kidder, meanwhile, was careful to avoid focusing on his longtime loves, like fishing or baseball; He feared that spending too much time in one of these areas might cause him to “get tired of it.”
Kidder was born in New York in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he enrolled in ROTC to avoid the Vietnam war draft.
After graduation, although he thought he would be assigned to a communications intelligence assignment in Washington, Kidder was instead sent to Vietnam; here the 22-year-old was put in charge of an eight-man rear echelon radio survey platoon that monitored the communications of enemy units to try to locate them.
Kidder documented this confusing experience in 2005’s My Detachment, an often humorous memoir that offers insights into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel who were at the height of reinforcement in Vietnam when the author served there in 1968-1969. War became an abstraction for Kidder, who had never seen combat and knew the enemy only as “dots on the map.”
After the war, Kidder and his new wife, Frances Gray Toland, moved to the midwest so Kidder could enroll in the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program, where she joined the wave of New Journalism pioneered by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.
Kidder hated the title “literary journalist,” telling the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that she found the description “pretentious.”
The term “creative nonfiction” also bothered him: “It suggests we’re making things up.”
Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.
“I don’t think fiction and nonfiction are that different, except that nonfiction wasn’t invented,” he told the AP. “But I take exception to those who think that nonfiction should not conform to the techniques of fiction… These belong to storytelling.”
