Thursday, Dec. 9: Tracy Kidder

Tracy Kidder: Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder joins us. He has been lauded by critics as the “master of creative nonfiction”… repeatedly praised for his ability to “turn the small details of daily life into a sort of grand, universal poetry,” using “an anthropologist’s eye and a novelist’s pen.” In 1982, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Soul of a New Machine – about the burgeoning computer industry. In 1985 he brought us House – which chronicles the compelling, dramatic and fundamentally human experience of home construction. And in 2003 he profiled the prolific Doctor Paul Farmer – the tireless force behind Partners in Health – in Mountains Beyond Mountains. A 1967 graduate of Harvard University – Kidder has returned to Cambridge this semester as the (first ever) Rosenthal writer in residence at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, politics and public policy. It’s there that he is working on a book about writing non-fiction.