Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Bill O'Donnelll.

When Susan Salter Reynolds interviewed Tracy Kidder for the Los Angeles Times in 2009, she asked the renowned nonfiction writer how he picked his subjects. “When I was young I’d report on a story and I’d have all these assumptions; it was upsetting to learn I was wrong,” Kidder said. While he said religion mostly drove him crazy, “what I do like is that religion reminds us that we don’t know everything.”

Writers, Reynolds wrote, tend to insist that they’re really just in it for the story, no matter how embarrassed or uncomfortable they might feel. But Kidder, she wrote, “appreciates good material.” But “I didn’t set out to write these books to do a good deed,” Kidder said. “I’m a writer, first of all.”

Kidder, who died last week at the age 80, certainly earned that moniker. In a career spanning five decades, he wrote on everything from true crime to computer design to retirement homes to genocide to Vietnam to pioneering figures in the world of medicine, earning a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award along the way. He also did, in fact, tell stories of hope and inspiration in several of his books; his Mountains Beyond Mountains, about the work of Dr. Paul Farmer in Haiti and elsewhere, makes the best confirmation present any Catholic teenager could want. Better even than money.

He was born John Tracy Kidder in New York City in 1945. After graduating from Harvard University in 1967 (one of his creative writing teachers was Robert Fitzgerald), he entered the U.S. Army and served as a military intelligence officer in Vietnam for two years, earning a Bronze Star.

Kidder married Frances Gray Toland in 1971. Three years later, he received his M.F.A. from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he also wrote his first book, The Road to Yuba City: A Journey into the Juan Corona Murders. Kidder later regretted writing the book so much that he purchased back the rights from Doubleday seven years later, later saying “I don’t want The Road to Yuba City to see the light of day again.”

Kidder wrote freelance pieces for The Atlantic Monthly for a number of years while working on his second book, The Soul of a New Machine. This 1981 book on computer programming, design and development won both the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Nonfiction a year later. Perhaps most remarkable about Kidder’s accomplishment is that the computer in question “was widely regarded as a kludge” by most people in the field; the book fascinated readers and reviewers because of the human stories contained within as much or more than the technological innovations.

His other nonfiction works included House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, Home Town, the aforementioned Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment: A Memoir, Strength in What Remains, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover from Great Success and Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People.

America reviewed many of Kidder’s books over the years, including Old Friends, Home Town and Strength in What Remains. While secular obituaries focused on The Soul of a New Machine as his masterwork, Kidder’s book that received the most attention in America’s pages was certainly Mountains Beyond Mountains. Detailing Dr. Paul Farmer’s work fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases in Haiti, Peru and Russia, Kidder’s book also profiled Farmer himself as well as his health organization, Partners in Health. (Hear Farmer discuss his work on our “Jesuitical” podcast here.)

In a 2022 tribute to Farmer in America after his death in Rwanda, his friend (and former college roommate) the Rev. John Dear wrote that Farmer should “not only be canonized as a saint but named a doctor of the church. He was the doctor who reclaimed the Gospel for the poor in an unprecedented way.”

In a 2003 America review of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Myles Sheehan, S.J., wrote that “Kidder allows himself to be a foil for the reader who is inspired by Dr. Farmer, annoyed with him from time to time, overwhelmed by Farmer’s hectic pace and sometimes uncertain of his judgments and plans.” But Sheehan also noted a religious undertone to Kidder’s writing: “His book is a little like an icon—the artist has allowed one a glimpse of a life and a world that goes beyond the lovingly created details to see glimpses of both a holy light and a real darkness. His crafting gives the book an almost hieratic quality and makes it spiritual reading of great value.”

When Farmer himself died in 2022, Kidder wrote an essay about him in The New York Times. “Many people feel deep grief at his death. Speaking only for myself, I find it hard to imagine a world without him in it, especially in this moment when cynicism and cupidity seem to have become cardinal virtues, and compassion and decency are deemed a sucker’s pursuit,” he wrote. “But Paul’s plans and dreams live on in the minds of thousands of people, who are equipped and eager to follow his example.” Amen to that.

Tracy Kidder died of lung cancer in Boston on March 24. He is survived by his wife, two children and four grandchildren. “Kidder’s greatest achievement was showing that ordinary people, like engineers, teachers, doctors, and the homeless, could be the heroes of serious literary nonfiction,” stated one obituary. “Over five decades, he helped transform narrative nonfiction into a major American art form, inspiring other writers to find urgent human stories in unglamorous places.”

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “GETHSEMANE,” by Michael Waters. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.