Tracy Kidder, Writer Who Plunged Into Topics, Dies at 80

Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned subjects such as home construction, computer engineering, and life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80. Kidder's family said he died of lung cancer Tuesday in Boston. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his 1981 work The Soul of a New Machine, which delved into a fledgling computer company long before most people cared about the inner workings of Silicon Valley. "It was like going into another country," Kidder told the AP at the time. "At first, I didn't understand what anybody was saying."

The technology wasn't what he found the most interesting, he told the New York Times. "It was the people themselves, their incredible passion for this thing," he said. Over the ensuing decades, Kidder immersed himself in worlds he was previously unfamiliar with, producing richly researched books about topics that may not sound like light reading. For 1989's Among Schoolchildren, he spent a year in a fifth-grade classroom, highlighting the dedication of a teacher in Massachusetts. For 1993's Old Friends, he observed the dark side of growing old in America while chronicling how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their infirmities, per the AP. In 2003, Kidder wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctor's effort to bring health care to Haiti. The work introduced Kidder to a new generation as 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 Wednesday on social media. The book also inspired the band Arcade Fire's 2010 hit "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)." Kidder was born in New York City in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he signed up for ROTC to avoid the Vietnam War draft. He served in Vietnam anyway, reaching the rank of first lieutenant and receiving a Bronze Star. After his return, Kidder wrote Ivory Fields, a war novel that was turned down by 33 publishers. He later said he burned the remaining copies of the manuscript, but a friend later found a copy and sent it to him. Kidder turned it into a memoir about his service in Vietnam: 2005's My Detachment.