GOOD PROSE

Like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, this is a succinct, authoritative, and entertaining arbiter of standards in contemporary writing, offering guidance for the professional writer and the beginner alike. This wise and useful book is the perfect companion for anyone who loves to read good books and longs to write one.

GOOD PROSE is an inspiring book about writing—about the creation of good prose—and the record of a warm and productive literary friendship. The story begins in 1973, in the offices of The Atlantic Monthly, in Boston, where a young freelance writer named Tracy Kidder came looking for an assignment. Richard Todd was the editor who encouraged him. From that article grew a lifelong association. Before long, Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the first book the two worked on together, had won the Pulitzer Prize. It was a heady moment, but for Kidder and Todd it was only the beginning of an education in the art of nonfiction. Good Prose explores three major nonfiction forms: narratives, essays, and memoirs. Kidder and Todd draw candidly, sometimes comically, on their own experience—their mistakes as well as accomplishments—to demonstrate the pragmatic ways in which creative problems get solved. They also turn to the works of a wide range of writers, novelists as well as nonfiction writers, for models and instruction. They talk about narrative strategies (and about how to find a story, sometimes in surprising places), about the ethical challenges of nonfiction, and about the realities of making a living as a writer. They offer some tart and emphatic opinions on the current state of language. And they take a clear stand against playing loose with the facts. Their advice is always grounded in the practical world of writing and publishing. 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. The author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, My Detachment, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine. RICHARD TODD has written cultural criticism for a number of magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and Harper’s, and he has contributed travel reportage to Condé Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure, Golf, and other magazines. He has had a long career as a magazine and book editor, serving as executive editor of The Atlantic, and as editor of New England Monthly, and publishing books under his own imprint at Houghton Mifflin. He continues to edit a very small group of writers. A graduate of Amherst College, he has taught there, and at Smith College and at the University of Massachusetts. He is currently on the faculty of the Goucher College MFA program, and lives in a rural corner of western Massachusetts, with his wife, Susan.