Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer-winning author who turned unlikely subjects into bestsellers, dies at 80

Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80 years old.

His son, Nat Kidder, confirmed to The Associated Press that Kidder died Tuesday of lung cancer 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 work of a young computer company long before most people cared about 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 the others were saying. »

In the decades since, Kidder has immersed himself in worlds with which he was unfamiliar, producing richly researched books on subjects that might not seem like light reading.

For 1989’s “Among Schoolchildren,” he spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom, highlighting the dedication of an inner-city teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Later, for 1993’s “Old Friends,” he observed the dark side of aging in America while recounting how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their infirmities.

Turning these events at a Northampton, Massachusetts, nursing home into a coherent narrative was one of his major challenges, Kidder told the AP.

“There’s not much happening, and yet I think when you read it you feel like a lot is happening. The little things must count for a lot,” he said.

In 2003, Kidder wrote “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about a doctor’s efforts to bring health care to Haiti. The work introduced Kidder’s work to a new generation of readers as many universities added it to their reading lists.

“Mountains Beyond 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).” »

“Tracy’s gifts for storytelling and tireless reporting are an enduring reflection of the empathy, 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 his longtime loves like fishing or baseball, fearing that if he spent too much time in any of those areas it might make him “get sick of it.”

Kidder was born in New York in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he enrolled in ROTC to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.

After graduation, although he thought he would be assigned a communications intelligence role in Washington, Kidder was sent to Vietnam, where the 22-year-old was placed in command of an eight-man radio search detachment in the rear that monitored the communications of enemy units to try to pinpoint their locations.

Kidder documented the disconcerting experience in 2005’s “My Detachment,” an often humorous memoir that offered a glimpse into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the more than 500,000 U.S. service members who were in Vietnam at the height of the surge when the author served there in 1968-69. War became an abstraction for Kidder, who never saw 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 enroll in the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program, where he latched onto the New Journalism wave started by writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.

Kidder hated the title “literary journalist,” telling the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he found the description “pretentious.”

The term creative nonfiction also irked him: “It suggests that we are making things up. »

Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.

“I don’t think fiction and nonfiction are that different, except that nonfiction can’t be invented,” he told the AP. “But I object to those who think that nonfiction should not appropriate the techniques of fiction…They belong to storytelling.”

Kidder is survived by his wife, Fran, their two children, Nat Kidder and Alice Kidder Bukhman, and four grandchildren.