What Tracy Kidder Stood For

Tracy Kidder, who died last week at the age of 80, was a longtime contributor to The Atlantic and a writer of articles and books that served for many readers as timeless exemplars of what nonfiction writing could be. A headline announcing his death—Kidder, it said, “turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers”—had it right but also had it wrong. A number of Kidder’s books, such as The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains, did indeed become best sellers. And the focus of these books—the inner secrets of computer design; medical care for those who have none—was not typical best-seller material.

But the subjects Kidder was drawn to—computers and health care, but also the challenges and miracles of public-school classrooms; the inner workings of small cities and towns; the character of friendships in nursing homes; the ordeal of an immigrant who fled genocide in his homeland for life in America; the dynamics of homelessness and the experience of the unhoused—were far from unlikely. Is anyone in America untouched by one or more of these, or unaware of them as part of the national fabric? Kidder had the audacity to tackle subjects that are so large and omnipresent that they tend to recede behind the scrim of ambient reality—no longer counting as “news” in any conventional sense. These subjects are also hard to understand without deep and lengthy engagement. They are difficult to write about in a manner that won’t be dismissed as “worthy,” garnering more praise than readership. And they are morally tinged in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes not.

Kidder’s writing changed people’s lives. He is rightly celebrated for the literary quality of his journalism—he held up John McPhee as a particular inspiration—but his work had a life beyond a reader’s encounter with the page. In the days after his death, I heard from a number of people who felt compelled to voice what his writing had meant to them. Here’s part of a letter from a young friend explaining the impact of Kidder’s book about Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, and Farmer’s fight against tuberculosis, HIV, and other communicable diseases in Haiti and elsewhere. The writer is Ben Hayes, a doctor specializing in addiction who works in a community-based clinic in the Bronx:

Reading Mountains Beyond Mountains was a turning point in my life. My dad gave me the book after I graduated from college, at a time when I was searching for a meaningful way to align my career with my moral compass. Kidder’s account of Paul Farmer and his colleague Dr. Jim Kim transformed my sense of what it meant to be a global citizen. It also reshaped how I thought about what it meant to be a doctor: See patients where they are. Don’t wait for them to come to you. Build relationships with dignity and compassion. And fight to change the structural determinants of health to achieve the same standard of care for all people, regardless of race, geography, or income.

Tracy Kidder had a look about him. He was lanky, with strong eyes, high cheekbones, and a patrician nose. He was comfortable in khaki trousers and rolled-up sleeves. He sailed. If you met him, you might correctly infer some of his early background: born in New York City, boyhood in Oyster Bay, education at Andover and Harvard. But then it was off 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 put him in touch with editors at The Atlantic, where Wakefield was a contributor.

Kidder’s arrival at the magazine, then in Boston, is described in the 2013 book Good Prose, written by Kidder and Richard Todd, who would be his editor for almost half a century. (Todd died in 2019.) It is a small, sneaky, funny, perfect volume about writing—a how-to book that in demeanor and substance would never be placed in a how-to lineup. The year was 1973, a time, the authors write, “that in memory seems closer to The Atlantic’s distant past than to our present era.” The building, in Boston’s Back Bay, was a shabby old family mansion, with servants’ quarters in the back for junior staff. Everyone used typewriters. Some women wore a hat at their desk. Kidder camped out just to use the phones—long-distance calls were expensive. He was 27, recently married, and living in rural Massachusetts. His wife, Frances, was and is a painter. Her portraits of Kidder over the years lodge in the eye with more urgency and ease than any photograph.

Kidder won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine, published in 1981, about teams of engineers at the Data General Corporation racing to develop a new computer system. The book, excerpted in The Atlantic, was published when the dawning digital world was incomprehensible to most people—including, at first, to the author. Kidder combined the necessary explication of digital and corporate mysteries with piercing character studies and a driving narrative. Engineers came across as (slightly strange) warriors. As for 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. Ninety-eight percent of the thrill comes from knowing that the thing you designed works, and works almost the way you expected it would. If that happens, part of you is in that machine.”

Emily Todd, the daughter of Richard and Susan Todd, was not yet a teenager when The Soul of a New Machine was being written:

I remember Tracy calling our house daily, showing up with manuscript pages in hand to read, pacing through the house, trying to puzzle out a problem with structure, worrying out loud. (Would anyone ever want to read a book called The Soul of a New Machine? I can still hear him saying.) Our whole family became familiar with the stages Tracy went through with each book—the search for the right subject, the years of reporting, the long first drafts. I knew their rituals, Tracy’s and my father’s. They spread out the manuscript on the floor, walking among the pages and moving them around. When the book was done, they imagined bad reviews—I think they might have even written them down as a talisman to ward off real ones.

The hallmark of Kidder’s writing was his deep—to his publishers, perhaps interminable—immersion in the subject matter: people and places, knowledge and expertise. Some journalism entails wide-ranging travel and ever-changing scenery. Kidder’s entailed close observation of a character or characters over very long periods of time: Mrs. Zajac’s fifth-grade classroom in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Dr. Jim O’Connell and his homeless patients on the streets of Boston. When NASA announced plans to allow a journalist to ride aboard the space shuttle, Kidder jumped at the chance to be The Atlantic’s nominee. Any such plans were of course scrapped after the Challenger tragedy, in 1986. Would a few days aloft have been enough time for Kidder? Factoring in the run-up to the flight, he surely could have made it work. But the imagination turns to an episode from 2024: the inadvertent stranding of a pair of astronauts for nine months aboard the International Space Station. Two characters, nine months, and a few hundred cubic meters—that would have been a perfect Kidder story.

How perfect 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 “bounteousness” of Kidder’s presence—the physical fullness of his proximity, whether he was bumping into a chair or spouting 1,000 words to someone else’s three. He was clear and insistent when it came to his aims for any project, and by no means shy. Corby Kummer, a newly arrived Atlantic editor, remembers working with Kidder on an excerpt—a cover story—from his 1985 book, House: “His manner was courtly, patient, and genial—until you suggested a change to his prose he thought he didn’t like. Then you were in for long, long discussion in which doubt and reflexive resistance would often but not always give way to amenability to alteration. During these sessions, it was clear that patience and congeniality took a far back seat to what he thought would be truest to his prose and the people in it.”

Over time, Kidder’s canvas grew bigger, and the moral strain in his thinking, always present, grew more pronounced. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, from 2003, Kidder wrote: “The world is full of miserable places. One way of living comfortably is not to think about them or, when you do, to send money.” Paul Farmer didn’t need Kidder’s book to enable his work bringing medical care to the world’s destitute, but Mountains Beyond Mountains brought that work to the attention of millions, and was meant to get under your skin (as Farmer himself could). In Rough Sleepers, published in 2023, Kidder focused on Jim O’Connell’s efforts to care for Boston’s homeless population. The counterpoint to such difficult subject matter came in the way Kidder wrote about people: their humane gestures and unexpected kindnesses, their improbable humor and sense of the absurd, their fellow feeling and even love. Kidder himself could be funny, including at his own expense—any reader of Good Prose will see genuine self-deprecation at play.

Kidder was working on Rough Sleepers when he crossed paths with James Parker, an Atlantic writer who has long been involved with the Black Seed Writers Group, a space for homeless writers in Boston:

I met Tracy when he was working on what wound up being his last book, about homelessness in Boston and in particular about its great healer, Dr. Jim O’Connell. Jim put us together, and Tracy came to a session of the Black Seed Writers Group. He loved the space, and the space loved him back. Tracy made you feel good. In person, and on the page. His tolerance, his energetic outward-flowing open-heartedness, was both a moral condition and an aesthetic strategy: It enabled him to see people clearly, people with souls, in all their grandeur and their ungrandeur, the better to write about them. And his style was an American classic: Transparent at first sight, it was actually prismatic. Light came through it and changed direction.

Kidder was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, and his illness progressed rapidly. On the day before he died, the three daughters of Richard and Susan Todd—Emily, Maisie, and Nell—stood by his bed in his daughter’s house, with his wife, Fran; his children, Alice and Nat; and other family members nearby, and took turns reading aloud from the introduction to Good Prose. The introduction closes with a few paragraphs of what the authors were too polite (or embarrassed) to call a manifesto. Call it what you will, but it captures what Kidder, like Todd, always stood for:

We think that the techniques of fiction never belonged exclusively to fiction, and that no techniques of storytelling are prohibited to the nonfiction writer, only the attempt to pass off inventions as facts. We think that the obscure person or setting can be a legitimate subject for the serious nonfiction writer. And we think that every piece of writing—whether story or argument or rumination, book or essay or letter home—requires the freshness and precision that convey a distinct human presence.

During the past three decades American culture has become louder, faster, more disjointed. For immediacy of effect, writers can’t compete with popular music or action movies, cable network news or the multiplying forms of instant messaging. We think that writers shouldn’t try, that there is no need to try. Writing remains the best route we know to clarity of thought and feeling.

It’s not the 23rd Psalm. But it’s a creed.