Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction author known for his humane portraits of everyday lives, including Home Town (1999), has died in Boston at 80, The New York Times reports. The cause was lung cancer, the paper said.
Kidder won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for his 1981 bestseller The Soul of a New Machine, which chronicles the intense efforts of a team of engineers rushing to launch a cutting-edge new computer. Kidder’s journalism and nonfiction books shed light on everything from a teacher’s experience in the classroom (Among Schoolchildren, 1989) and the process of home construction (House, 1985) to the work of Partners in Health founder Paul Farmer (Mountains Beyond Mountains, 2003). Kirkus praised Mountains Beyond Mountains as “an important story that feels like it breathes a dose of virtuous oxygen right into readers’ heads.”
“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,” Kidder’s publisher, Random House, said in a statement.
Born in New York City on Nov. 12, 1945, Kidder attended Harvard College. After serving in the military during the Vietnam War, he enrolled at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He then moved with his family to the town of Williamsburg, in western Massachusetts.
Kidder’s other books include Rough Sleepers (2023), A Truck Full of Money (2016), and Strength in What Remains (2009).
Toni Hays, president of Regis College in Weston, Mass., paid tribute to her late friend on Instagram. “Tracy was an amazing writer and storyteller,” she wrote. “He was always able to bring to life some of the deepest experiences and profound life stories of incredibly courageous people.”
Amy Reiter is a writer in Brooklyn.
