Tracy Kidder, the award-winning nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to nursing home life into bestsellers, has died unexpectedly. He was 80 years old.
His son, Nat Kidder, confirmed to The Associated Press that Kidder died of lung cancer on Tuesday at his daughter’s home in Boston.
Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1981 work The Soul of a New Machine, which looked at the workings of a start-up 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 AP at the time. “At first, I didn’t understand what anyone was saying.”
Over the following decades, Kidder immersed himself in worlds with which he was previously unfamiliar, producing richly researched books on topics that might not seem like light reading.
In his 1989 film Among Schoolchildren, he spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom, highlighting the dedication of an inner-city teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Later, in the 1993 film Old Friends, he observed the dark side of aging in America while also recording how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their frailties.
Kidder told the AP that turning these events at the Northampton, Massachusetts, nursing home into a coherent story was one of his main challenges.
“Not much happens, and yet I think when you read it, you feel like a lot is happening. Small things should have a big impact,” he said.
In 2003, Kidder wrote his book Mountains Beyond Mountains about a doctor’s efforts to provide health care in Haiti. The work introduced Kidder’s work to a new generation of readers with many universities adding it to their reading lists.
“Mountains Beyond Mountains have changed my life — and the lives of many 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 song “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).”
“Tracy’s talents for tireless storytelling and reporting are an enduring reflection of the compassion, integrity and endless curiosity he brought to everything he did,” Random House, Kidder’s longtime publisher, said in a statement Wednesday.
All the while, Kidder was careful to avoid focusing on things he had long loved like fishing or baseball, fearing that if he spent too much time in one of those areas, it might cause him to “get sick of it.”
Kidder was born in New York City in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he signed up for ROTC to avoid the Vietnam War draft.
After graduation, although he thought he would be assigned a communications intelligence role in Washington, Kidder was instead sent to Vietnam, where the 22-year-old was put in charge of an eight-man radio research detachment in the back row that monitored enemy units’ communications to try to determine their locations.
Kidder documented the disorienting experience in his 2005 book, “My Detachment,” an often humorous memoir that provided insight into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the more than 500,000 American military personnel who were in Vietnam at the height of the military buildup when the author served there in 1968-69. War became an abstraction for Kidder, who had never seen combat and knew the enemy only as “dots on a map.”
After the war, Kidder and his new wife, Frances Gray Toland, moved to the Midwest so Kidder could attend the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program, where he joined the new wave of journalism pioneered by writers such as Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.
Kidder hated the title “literary journalist,” and told the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he found the description “pretentious.”
He was also bothered by the term “creative nonfiction”: “It suggests that we are making things up.”
Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.
“I don’t think fiction and nonfiction are very different, except that nonfiction is not invented,” he told the AP. “But I make an exception for those people who think nonfiction shouldn’t fit into the techniques of fiction…they belong to storytelling.”
Kidder leaves behind his wife, Fran, two children, Nat Kidder and Alice Kidder Bachmann, and four grandchildren.