Tracy Kidder
American nonfiction writer
Tracy Kidder was an American nonfiction writer whose book The Soul of a New Machine earned a Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Paul Farmer.
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American Born 1945 in New York City, United States Died 2026
About Tracy Kidder
Tracy Kidder (1945 to 2026) wrote nonfiction with a clear narrative thread and a personal voice, and he counted as a literary journalist. The Soul of a New Machine (1981), which tells how a new computer came to be at Data General, brought him the Pulitzer Prize. Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003) is his biography of Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist who founded Partners in Health. Other books looked at building a home (House), elementary teaching (Among Schoolchildren) and growing old (Old Friends). He also wrote Strength in What Remains. Kidder studied English at Harvard and earned a Master of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He served in Vietnam. In 2010 he became the first A. M. Rosenthal Writer-in-Residence at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, where he co-wrote Good Prose, a book about writing nonfiction.