Kidder lived for years in Williamsburg, a town set in the foothills of the Berkshire highlands in Hampshire County. While his long and esteemed career included a wide scope of topics – from his military service in Vietnam to Mexican serial killers – Kidder also documented Western Massachusetts life. His 1999 book “Home Town” is about the everyday goings-on of Northampton.
One of his best known works is “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” a biography of North Adams-born physician Paul Farmer, who worked to fight tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru and Russia. Kidder spoke to WAMC about what drew him to Farmer’s story after Farmer’s death in 2022.
“Here's this guy, once I knew a little bit more about him, who could have had a very cushy and quite an exalted career in infectious disease and just in medicine generally, and in anthropology as well," Kidder told WAMC. "But here he was, spending most of his life and his, I dare say, it was pretty clear that most of his passion was going to a job that looked pretty near impossible.”
Among his many accomplishments, Kidder won both the Pulitzer Price and National Book award for his 1981 work “The Soul of a New Machine,” a nonfiction narrative about the world of computer engineering. He leaves behind his wife Fran and two children.
