By Jack Limpert
The writer Tracy Kidder and the editor Richard Todd met 40 years ago at The Atlantic Monthly, and this year they collaborated on a book: Good Prose – The Art of Nonfiction, described as “Stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing.” When they met, Todd was 32 and had been in Boston at The Atlantic Monthly for four years; Kidder was 27 and trying to write a story for the magazine about a mass murder in California. The editing-writing partnership has endured, with Kidder going from magazine articles to books—his first, with Todd as his editor, was The Soul of a New Machine, which in 1982 won the Pulitzer Prize. You come away from Good Prose feeling that you’d enjoy having lunch with either of them.