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Mountains Beyond Mountains

About the Author

Photo of Tracy Kidder.

The Baltimore Sun has described Tracy Kidder as the “master of non-fiction narrative.” His work has received many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Soul of a New Machine (1981), a book that chronicles the efforts of computer engineers in their quest to build one of the world’s first personal computers. He has published seven books, including Among Schoolchildren (1989), House (1985), Old Friends (1993) and Home Town (1999). Tracy Kidder started his career as a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review.

Kidder is well-known for his ability to capture the extraordinary facets of the lives of ordinary people. Mountains Beyond Mountains, his latest book about medical philanthropist, Dr. Paul Farmer, takes this talent into new territory. Kidder recently told the Atlantic Monthly that Dr. Farmer is “the least ordinary ordinary person” he has ever known. Kidder first met Dr. Farmer in 1994 while working on a story for Atlantic Monthly about the U.S. military’s involvement in reinstating Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government . Kidder later wrote a profile on Dr. Farmer titled “The Good Doctor” for the July 2000 issue of The New Yorker. That profile was the seed for Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Kidder graduated from Harvard in 1967 with a BA in English. He then served a tour of duty in Vietnam as a First Lieutenant and received a Bronze Star for his service. Upon returning home, he joined the University of Iowa’s writer’s workshop and received his MFA in 1974. He lives in Main and Massachusetts and will soon publish a memoir about his time in Vietnam titled My Detachment.

Other Books by Tracy Kidder

Home Town
New York : Random House, 1999

Old Friends
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1993

Among Schoolchildren
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1989

House
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1985

Soul of a New Machine
Boston : Little, Brown, c1981

The road to Yuba City; a journey into the Juan Corona murders 
Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1974

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