Editor’s note: This is the first of two parts. The second installment will appear Monday.
“Once you have selected a person to write about, that person has become the central mystery you want to solve, knowing that you never will solve it completely.”
Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, “Good Prose”
Tracy Kidder led with love. By interrogating injustice through the eyes of imperfect individuals who met conflict with compassion, the Williamsburg author inspired real change.
After winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982 for “The Soul of a New Machine,” Kidder wrote four books set in western Massachusetts. He was working on a fifth, about food insecurity and the work of Robin Bialecki, executive director of the Easthampton Community Center, when he died of lung cancer on March 24 at age 80.
‘I’m just scratching the surface’
At their first meeting in April 2025, he commanded Bialecki’s attention.
“OK, tell me everything you know about hunger and how we can make it stop,” Kidder had greeted Bialecki as he strode into the food pantry. But his broad shoulders — he’d been a football player as a teenager at Phillips Academy — were hunched ever-so-slightly under two layers of clothing: a button-down shirt and a windbreaker. When he’d go on to interview patrons of the community center, he’d wear a baseball cap whose bill rested just above his glasses, like he valued being hidden as much as being seen.
“It’s not possible,” Bialecki told him then. “Hunger has been in the world since the beginning of time.”
“What about this part of the world?” Kidder countered in his mellifluous voice, his hands getting involved now. When the volume of his voice rose, he gesticulated like he was conducting a symphony, a crescendo of movement from an unassuming maestro.
“We’re doing the best we can, but we’re not going to get to the root of it,” she insisted. She began listing the reasons why. The economy was tanking, the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was being threatened — in fact, they were all one step away from being hungry.
“You talk too fast!” he interrupted, his pen scratching his notebook. “Would you slow down?”
His “heart-wrenching enthusiasm,” as she’d put it later, only made her smile. In July, after following Bialecki for weeks, he’d publish “A New Era of Hunger Has Begun” in the New York Times, and he’d tell her their partnership was just beginning.
To Kidder’s subjects, “the beginning” could feel never-ending. This may be why he jokingly called the people he wrote about his “victims.” He routinely sketched ordinary, extraordinary people and their community impact in essays followed by deeply researched books that took years to complete.
At the end of his first interview with Bialecki, after peppering her with questions for two and a half hours and taking 14 pages of notes, he was already unsatisfied. “I’m just scratching the surface,” he said. “We need to talk.”
A story about a storyteller
Obsession was one of Kidder’s gifts.
“Pretty early on, he was reading to all of us anything he’d written that day,” said his daughter, Alice Bukhman. When she and her brother, Nat, were growing up in the 1980s, they would join their mother, Fran, in their Williamsburg living room while Kidder shared his latest draft with a rapt audience.
Or so he thought.
“Usually, my mother would fall asleep on the window seat,” said Bukhman.
The director of clinical operations for emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, Bukhman managed her father’s hospice care at her home in Cambridge, where he was surrounded by family and friends. He spent his last days listening to loved ones’ memories and roasts, collected in a book his daughter had put together, a story about a storyteller that the family took turns reading aloud.
He preferred the stories of his victims.
“In the end,” said his daughter, “he envied the people he wrote about and that may have been what made his work so powerful. He really tried to inhabit their lives.”
‘The best damn journalist in the Western Hemisphere’
His tireless process suggested both self-doubt and profound faith — that immersion and repetition were central to revision.
“I learned to like rewriting, maybe too much, but really it is the writer’s special privilege,” Kidder writes in “Good Prose,” his guide to the craft that he coauthored with his longtime editor, Richard Todd. “We rarely get the kind of chance in life that rewriting offers, to revise our pasts, to take back what we’ve said and say it better before others hear it. I usually write about ten more or less complete drafts, each one usually though not always closer to the final thing, like golf shots.”
The book is a tribute to a 46-year partnership between best friends who had an insular bond but were aware enough to laugh at themselves. Todd died in 2019.
“To Todd, and practically everyone else, Kidder was young beyond his years,” reads the book’s introduction. “He was plainly ambitious, but his self-esteem ranged from abject to grandiose. Once, at a Christmas party that went on too long, he confronted [The Atlantic magazine’s then editor-in-chief] Bob Manning and announced, ‘I’m the best damn journalist in the Western Hemisphere.’ Hung over and contrite the next morning, he was comforted by Todd, who said, ‘At least you didn’t claim the whole world.’”
Not long after that disastrous fete, he won two of the most prestigious prizes in literature for his groundbreaking book on the computer industry, earning what he called “the luxury of time” to chart his career.
The gold standard
“A friend of ours who was himself a writer and editor for The Nation and Newsweek, a serious journalist, said Tracy was basically the gold standard for this kind of work,” said Jamie Kilbreth, who met Kidder when they were assigned seats next to each other in chapel at Phillips Academy in Andover. Kilbreth was a freshman and Kidder a junior at the rigorous Massachusetts preparatory school in the 1960s.
The two both went on to Harvard University, where Kidder explored fiction writing, though he later became known for his nonfiction. Kilbreth, who lives in Maine, would become his lawyer and help him negotiate multiple book deals.
“Back then he was a big football player,” he said. “I would say the idea that he’d become a serious writer was sort of like George W. Bush becoming president.” (Bush attended Andover at the same time, where he was the head cheerleader.) “But one of the things you’ll hear about him is that when he decides he’s doing something, he’s all in.”
Kidder’s fiction — and its reception — became a source of humor and perspective in “Good Prose” and his memoir, “My Detachment.” In the latter, he describes writing short stories at Harvard and calling his on-again, off-again girlfriend to read them to her over the phone, noting her occasional yawn. Later, after leaving his journal open on his bed, hoping she’d be moved by his talent, he finds her succinct critique: “Blah!”
After a year in Vietnam, Kidder would write a novel about his experience in the Army, “Ivory Fields.” He despised it so much that he burned it. A friend later sent him an errant copy, and he was relieved to see how much his writing had evolved. In his memoir, written in 2005, he includes excerpts of the novel, written in 1968, which opens, “About this time is when the sad story begins. It is the saddest story you ever hope to hear.”
He wrestles with his once exaggerated sense of self-importance and his penchant for melodrama in “My Detachment.” In “Good Prose,” published in 2013, it’s clear that chipping away at his own facade has allowed him to plumb the depths of others’ experiences.
“I think so many in my generation and the next generation of nonfiction writers, we stand on Tracy’s shoulders,” said Chicago-based journalist Alex Kotlowitz, a self-described “fanboy and friend.” In 1992, Kotlowitz sought out Kidder for a blurb on his first book, “There Are No Children Here,” which became a national bestseller.
Writer Adrian Nicole LeBlanc met Kidder, a lifelong mentor, as a senior at Smith College in Kidder’s writing seminar in 1985. LeBlanc, who now lives in Manhattan, was featured in Robert Boynton’s “The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft,” alongside Kotlowitz, in 2005.
“I can continue to hear him in his books,” she said of Kidder, “and that’s a deep comfort. As a professional writer I admire [his voice], but as a former student and friend I still get to hear him and learn from him, because his books hold so many of the things he tried to teach me.”
A ‘Dybeck’ draft, a Dybek laugh
Tracy Kidder was a literary legend — and an amusing human.
“If you read his work in chronological order, you can see, book by book, his empathy grow,” said Stuart Dybek, a poet and fiction writer who met Kidder at the University of Iowa, where they both received a Master of Fine Arts in 1974.
In total, Kidder wrote 12 nonfiction books, including his first and perhaps least-known, “The Road to Yuba City.” His dynamic subjects, like Deogratias of “Strength in What Remains,” and Mrs. Zajac of “Among Schoolchildren,” leap off the page.
Dybek, who lives in Chicago, once shared a university office with Kidder, and maybe even the fifth of whiskey left to them in a desk drawer by a mentor. “We became the best kind of friends you could be in that world, which were critics of one another who were not competing with each other,” he said.
“It was a hugely important quarter in Trace’s life because he was making a switch from fiction to nonfiction, and nonfiction at that time was changing the character of American letters,” said Dybek, noting that pioneers of new journalism like Tom Wolfe were artfully blending factual reporting with literary techniques. “Wolfe was saying us nonfiction guys are going to write like those 19th-century guys,” like Franz Kafka, “who dominated the world.”
Year after year, they rented a cottage in the Caribbean, where mornings were reserved for writing and critiquing each other’s work, and afternoons for spear fishing. “The way it went, he did a zillion drafts, then finally a ‘Dybek’ draft,” said Kidder’s friend. After another revision, a draft went to Todd, was revised once more, and finally reached Kidder’s agent.
The contemporaries shared countless laughs.
Early in his career, Dybek, whose fiction writing was later compared to Ernest Hemingway’s, was honored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. He invited Kidder to be his guest, and hijinks ensued.
Read Part 2 of our tribute on Monday. There will be a memorial service for Tracy Kidder on June 6 at noon at Smith College. Details available at tracykidder.com. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.