Tracy Kidder, who died last week aged 80, was a long-time contributor Atlantic and author of articles and books that served to many readers as timeless examples of what nonfiction writing could be. A the headline announcing his death—Kidder, it said, “turned the most unlikely people into salespeople”—was right but also wrong. A number of Kidder’s books, such as Soul of the New Machine and Mountains Beyond MountainsIt really became a best seller. And the purpose of these books—the insider secrets of computer design; treatment for those who don’t—it wasn’t the usual best-selling material.
But Kidder’s subjects fascinated him—computers and health care, but also the challenges and wonders of public school classrooms; inner workings of small towns and cities; friendly behavior in nursing homes; the plight of an immigrant who fled genocide in his country for his life in America; the dynamics of homelessness and the experience of the homeless—were not so simple. Is there anyone in America who has not been touched by one or more of these, or does not recognize them as part of the national fabric? Kidder had the courage to tackle subjects so vast and ubiquitous that they tend to recede from reality—no longer counted as “news” in any conventional sense. These lessons are also difficult to understand without deep and long-term participation. It is difficult to write them in such a way that they will not be dismissed as “worthy,” receiving more praise than reading. And they are morally tinged in a way that is sometimes clear and sometimes not.
Kidder’s writing changed people’s lives. He is celebrated for the quality of his journalistic writing—he held John McPhee as a particular inspiration—but his work had a life beyond meeting the reader and the page. In the days after his death, I heard from several people who felt compelled to say what his writings meant to them. Here is part of a letter from a young friend describing the impact of Kidder’s book on Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health, and Farmer’s fight against tuberculosis, HIV, and other infectious diseases in Haiti and beyond. The author is Ben Hayes, a doctor specializing in addiction who works in a community clinic in the Bronx:
Reading Mountains Beyond Mountains it was a turning point in my life. My father gave me the book after I graduated from college, at a time when I was searching for a meaningful way to reconcile my work with my moral compass. Kidder’s description of Paul Farmer and his colleague Dr. Jim Kim changed my sense of what it means to be a global citizen. It also changed the way I thought about what it means to be a doctor: See where the patients are. Don’t wait for them to come to you. Build relationships with respect and compassion. And fight to change the structural determinants of health to achieve the same level of care for all people, regardless of race, geography or income.
Tracy Kidder had an opinion on it. He was lankiy, strong eyes, high cheekbones, and a patrician nose. He was well dressed in khaki pants with rolled up sleeves. He traveled by ship. If you meet him, you can accurately guess some of his early history: born in New York City, childhood in Oyster Bay, education at Andover and Harvard. But then it was on to Vietnam, where he served for a year. At Harvard, he had begun to develop a taste for writing—fiction, at first—and after returning from Vietnam, he enrolled in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. One of his teachers there, the novelist and journalist Dan Wakefield, eventually introduced him to the editors Atlanticwhere Wakefield was a contributor.
Kidder’s arrival at the magazine, then in Boston, is described in a 2013 book Beautiful Prosewritten by Kidder and Richard Todd, who would be his editor for nearly half a century. (Todd he died in 2019.) It’s a small, witty, funny, and thorough volume about writing—a how-to book that by nature and wealth will never be placed in a how-to format. The year was 1973, when, the authors write, “which in memory seems closer AtlanticA long time ago than our present time.” The building, in Boston’s Back Bay, was a dilapidated family home, with servants’ quarters behind the lower staff. Everyone used a typewriter. Some women wore hats to their desks. Kidder camped out just to use the phones—long-distance phones were expensive. He was 27 years old, recently married, and lived in rural Massachusetts. His wife, Frances, was and is a painter. His pictures of Kidder over the years stay on the eye with more urgency and ease than any other picture.
Kidder won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Soul of the New Machinepublished in 1981, about teams of engineers at Data General Corporation racing to create a new computer system. that book, has been released in Atlanticit was published when the booming digital world was incomprehensible to most people—including, at first, to the author. Kidder combined the necessary explanations of digital puzzles and associations with piercing character studies and driving narratives. Engineers came in as (slightly surprising) heroes. About the “soul” of the title: It refers to the designers who gave life to their creation. “Look,” one engineer explains, “I don’t have to get official recognition for anything I do. you it’s on that machine.”
Emily Todd, daughter of Richard and Susan Todd, was still a teenager at the time Soul of the New Machine it was written:
I remember Tracy calling our house every day, showing up with pages of text in hand to read, pacing the house, trying to figure out a design problem, struggling loudly. (Would anyone like to read a book called Soul of the New Machine? (I can still hear him say it.) Our whole family knew the steps Tracy went through in each book—the search for the right subject, the years of reporting, the long first drafts. I knew their rituals, Tracy and my father. They spread the text on the floor, walking between the pages and moving them. When the book was finished, they thought up a bad review—I think they might even write it as a charm to avoid the real thing.
The hallmark of Kidder’s writing was his deep—for his publishers, perhaps irresistible—immersion in subject matter: people and places, knowledge and expertise. Some journalism involves extensive travel and ever-changing landscapes. Kidder involved close observation of a character or characters over a long period of time: Mrs. Zajac in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Dr. Jim O’Connell and his homeless patients on the streets of Boston. When NASA announced plans to allow a reporter to board the space shuttle, Kidder jumped at the chance. Atlanticthe nominee of. Any such plans were of course scrapped after the Challenger disaster, in 1986. Would a few days on top be enough time for Kidder? On the run, he could definitely make it work. But thoughts turn to 2024: the accidental stranding of a pair of astronauts for nine months inside the International Space Station. Two characters, nine months, and a few hundred cubic meters—that it would be the perfect Kidder story.
How great an experience it would have been for the astronauts to have Kidder with them is hard to say. Susan Todd remembers what she calls the “generosity” of Kidder’s presence—the physical perfection of his closeness, whether he was banging on a chair or blurting out 1,000 words to someone else’s trio. He was clear and emphatic when it came to his goals for any project, and by no means shy. Corby Kummer, a recent arrival Atlantic editor, recalls working with Kidder excerpt – cover story– from his 1985 book, House: “His approach was polite, patient, and reasonable—until you suggested changes to his prose that he thought he didn’t like. Then you were in a long, long discussion in which doubts and objections of constant reflection would give a chance to be corrected. During these sessions, it was clear that patience and understanding took a back seat to what people thought was true and real.”
Over time, Kidder’s canvas grew larger, and the moral stress in his thinking, which had always been there, became clearer. In Mountains Beyond Mountainsfrom 2003, Kidder wrote: “The world is full of poor places. Paul Farmer did not need Kidder’s book to enable his work to bring medical care to the world’s poor, but Mountains Beyond Mountains it brought the work to millions of people, and it was meant to get under your skin (like Farmer himself could). In Sleeplesspublished in 2023, Kidder focused on Jim O’Connell’s efforts to care for Boston’s homeless. The opposition to such a difficult subject came in the way Kidder wrote about people: their human gestures and unexpected kindness, their unlikely humor and sense of absurdity, their fellow feelings and even love. Kidder himself can be funny, including at his own expense—any reader of Beautiful Prose you will see true self-loathing in the game.
Kidder was working Sleepless when he crossed paths with James Parker, an Atlantic a writer who has long been involved with the Black Seed Writers Group, a space for homeless writers in Boston:
I met Tracy when she was working on her last book, about homelessness in Boston and especially about the great healer, Dr. Jim O’Connell. Jim put us together, and Tracy came to a meeting of the Black Seed Writers Group. He loved space, and space loved him back. Tracy made you feel comfortable. In person, and on the page. His patience, his open heart with a strong flowing exterior, was a moral condition and an aesthetic strategy: It enabled him to see people clearly, people with souls, in all their greatness and their wretchedness, the better to write about them. And his style was traditional American: Open at first glance, it was really original. The light passed through it and changed direction.
Kidder was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, and his illness progressed quickly. The day before his death, Richard and Susan Todd’s three daughters—Emily, Maisie, and Nell—stood at his bedside in his daughter’s home, along with his wife, Fran; his children, Alice and Nat; and other family members who were nearby, and took turns reading aloud from the introduction of Beautiful Prose. The introduction closes with a few paragraphs of what the writers were polite (or were ashamed) to call a manifesto. Call it what you will, but it captures what Kidder, like Todd, always stood for:
We think that story techniques were never exclusively associated with fiction, and that there are no storytelling techniques that are off limits to the fiction writer, it is an attempt to pass off invention as fact. We think that an unknown person or setting can be a valid subject for a serious fiction writer. And we think that every piece of writing—whether a story or an argument or an extract, a book or an essay or a letter home—needs a freshness and precision that conveys a distinct human presence.
Over the past three decades, American culture has become larger, faster, and more fragmented. For speedy performance, writers can’t compete with popular music or thrillers, cable news or instant messaging. We think that writers should not try, that there is no need to try. Writing remains the best way we know to express thoughts and feelings.
It is not Psalm 23. But it is faith.
