Tracy Kidder, an award-winning narrative nonfiction writer who turned everything from computer engineering to life in a nursing home into unexpected bestsellers, has died. He was 80.

Kidder’s longtime publisher Random House confirmed his death in a statement on Wednesday: “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 won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award for his 1981 work The Soul of a New Machine, which delved into the work of 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 Associated Press at the time. “At first, I didn’t understand what anybody was saying.”

Over the 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 an inner-city teacher in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Later, for 1993’s Old Friends, he observed the dark side of growing old in America while also chronicling how two friends maintained their dignity in a nursing home despite their infirmities.

Turning these events at a Northampton, Massachusetts, nursing home into a cohesive narrative was one of his major challenges, Kidder told the AP.

“Not a lot happens, and yet I think when you read it, you feel that a lot does. Small things have to count for a great deal,” he said.

In 2003, Kidder wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains, about a doctor’s effort to bring healthcare to Haiti. The work introduced Kidder’s work to a new generation of readers as numerous 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 on social media on Wednesday.

The book even inspired the indie rock band Arcade Fire’s 2010 hit Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains).

All the while, Kidder was careful to eschew focusing on his longtime loves like fishing or baseball, afraid that if he spent too much time in one of those realms, it might cause him to “feel sick of it”.

Kidder was born in New York City in 1945 and attended Harvard University, where he signed up for the ROTC to avoid the Vietnam war draft.

After graduation, despite thinking he would be assigned a Washington communications intelligence role, Kidder was instead sent off to Vietnam, where the 22-year-old was placed in charge of an eight-man rear-echelon radio research detachment that monitored the communications of enemy units to try to pinpoint their locations.

Kidder documented the confounding experience in 2005’s My Detachment, an often humorous memoir that offered insights into the lives of the support troops who made up most of the 500,000-plus US military personnel who were in Vietnam at the height of the buildup when the author served there in 1968-1969. The war became an abstraction for Kidder, who never saw combat and knew the enemy only as “dots on a map”.

After the war, Kidder and his new wife, Frances Gray Toland, moved to the midwest so Kidder could enroll in the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program, where he latched on to the New Journalism wave pioneered by writers like Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote.

Kidder hated the title “literary journalist”, telling the Dallas Morning News in 2010 that he found the description “pretentious”.

The term “creative nonfiction” irked him too: “It suggests we make things up.”

Instead, he saw himself as a storyteller.

“I don’t think of fiction and nonfiction as all that different, except that nonfiction is not invented,” he told the AP. “But I take exception to those people who think nonfiction should not appropriate the techniques of fiction … They belong to storytelling.”

N Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-winning Native American novelist, dies aged 89

Jan 29 2024

N Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel House Made of Dawn is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.

Momaday died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.

“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

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N Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel House Made of Dawn is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.

Momaday died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.

“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

House Made of Dawn, published in 1968, tells of a second world war soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in, a story as old as war itself: in this case, home is a Native community in rural New Mexico. Much of the book was based on Momaday’s childhood in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.

“I grew up in both worlds and straddle those worlds even now,” Momaday said in a 2019 PBS documentary. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life.”

Like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Momaday’s novel was a second world war story that resonated with a generation protesting the Vietnam war. In 1969, Momaday became the first Native American to win the fiction Pulitzer, and his novel helped launch a generation of authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Louise Erdrich. His other admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country’s first Native American to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.

“He was a kind of literary father for a lot of us,” Harjo told the Associated Press during a telephone interview on Monday. “He showed how potent and powerful language and words were in shaping our very existence.”

Over the following decades, he taught at Stanford, Princeton and Columbia universities, among other top-ranking schools, was a commentator for NPR, and lectured worldwide. He published more than a dozen books, from Angle of Geese and Other Poems to the novels The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Ancient Child, and became a leading advocate for the beauty and vitality of traditional Native life.

Addressing a gathering of Native American scholars in 1970, Momaday said: “Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.” He championed Natives’ reverence for nature, writing: “the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape.” He shared stories told to him by his parents and grandparents. He regarded oral culture as the wellspring of language and storytelling, and dated American culture back not to the early English settlers, but to ancient times, noting the procession of gods depicted in the rock art at Utah’s Barrier Canyon.

“We do not know what they mean, but we know we are involved in their meaning,” he wrote in the essay The Native Voice in American Literature.

In 2007, then president George W Bush presented Momaday with a National Medal of Arts “for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition”. Besides his Pulitzer, his honors included an Academy of American Poets prize and, in 2019, the Dayton literary peace prize.

Momaday was married three times, most recently to Barbara Glenn, who died in 2008. He had four daughters, one of whom, Cael, died in 2017.

He was born Navarre Scott Mammedaty, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and was a member of the Kiowa Tribe. His mother was a writer, and his father an artist who once told his son: “I have never known an Indian child who couldn’t draw,” a talent Momaday demonstrably shared. His artwork, from charcoal sketches to oil paintings, were included in his books and exhibited in museums in Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota. Audio guides to tours of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of the American Indian featured Momaday’s avuncular baritone.

After spending his teens in New Mexico, he studied political science at the University of Mexico and received a master’s and PhD in English from Stanford. Momaday began as a poet, his favorite art form, and the publication of House Made of Dawn was an unintentional result of his early reputation.

Much of his writing was set in the American west and south-west, whether tributes to bears – the animals he most identified with – or a cycle of poems about the life of Billy the Kid, a childhood obsession. He saw writing as a way of bridging the present with the ancient past and summed up his quest in the poem If I Could Ascend:

Something like a leaf lies here within me; / it wavers almost not at all, / and there is no light to see it by / that it withers upon a black field. / If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, / I would make a word of it at last, / and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.

In 2019, he was the subject of a PBS American Masters documentary in which he discussed his belief he was a reincarnation of a bear connected to the Native American origin story around Devils Tower in Wyoming. He told the Associated Press in a rare interview that the documentary allowed him to reflect on his life, saying he was humbled that writers continued to say his work has influenced them.

“I’m greatly appreciative of that, but it comes a little bit of a surprise every time I hear it,” Momaday said. “I think I have been an influence. It’s not something I take a lot of credit for.”