Tracy Kidder, Author and Pulitzer Prize winner

Featured Books:

A Truck Full of Money
Published on 9/20/2016

Tracy Kidder – author of The Soul of a New Machine and Mountains Beyond Mountains – now brings us the spirited life of an American original, the engrossing story of an inventive, kinetic, and generous man who faces what seems like an enviable problem: How to deal with great success.

Paul English grew up in working-class Boston in the 1970s, a boy who rebelled against authority, but discovered a world that called out to his talents the first time he saw a computer. He had a mind for the age that lay ahead.

With the skill of a natural storyteller — “master of the craft of nonfiction narrative” (The Baltimore Sun) – Tracy Kidder takes us on a pilgrim’s fascinating journey through the technological revolution of the last 30 years. It became clear early in his life that Paul English was a member of an elite class. He belonged to what one of the world’s greatest living computer scientists, Donald Knuth, calls “the 2 percent”: people with a special talent for programming, a talent that had lain dormant for millennia in a fraction of humanity, waiting for its very instrument — the computer — to be invented. Read more

With A Truck Full of Money, Tracy Kidder returns to the world he first explored 30 years ago in The Soul of a New Machine. It was a bestseller on its first publication in 1981 and was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award (then called The American Book Award). With the touch of an expert thriller writer, Kidder recounts the feverish efforts of a team of Data General researchers to create a new 32-bit superminicomputer. A compelling account of individual sacrifice and human ingenuity, The Soul of a New Machine endures as the classic chronicle of the computer age and the masterminds behind its technological advances

“A superb book,” said Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. “All the incredible complexity and chaos and exploitation and loneliness and strange, half-mad beauty of this field are honestly and correctly drawn.”

The Washington Post Book World said, “Kidder has created compelling entertainment. He offers a fast, painless, enjoyable means to an initial understanding of computers, allowing us to understand the complexity of machines we could only marvel at before, and to appreciate the skills of the people who create them.” Read more

Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes.

His books include The Soul of a New Machine, House, Among Schoolchildren, Old Friends, Home Town, Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Strength in What Remains, and (with Richard Todd) Good Prose.
Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.

Watch the trailer for
Strength in What Remains: