Good Prose

A “smart, lucid, and entertaining” (The Boston Globe) modern classic of writing advice and a thoughtful record of the long and productive literary friendship between two renowned authors

“You are in such good company—congenial, ironic, a bit old-school—that you’re happy to follow [Kidder and Todd] where they lead you.”—The Wall Street Journal

“As approachable and applicable as any writing manual available.”—Associated Press

The story begins in 1973, in the Boston offices of The Atlantic Monthly, where a young freelance writer named Tracy Kidder finds his first assignment from an editor named Richard Todd. Before long, Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, the first book the two worked on together, has won a Pulitzer Prize, and a lifelong education in the art of nonfiction has begun.

In Good Prose, Kidder and Todd draw candidly on their own experience to offer advice to writers of all kinds. They explore three major nonfiction forms—narratives, essays, and memoirs—and examine the creative strategies and ethical challenges of nonfiction and the realities of making a living as a writer. Good Prose—like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style—is a succinct, authoritative, and entertaining arbiter of standards in contemporary writing, offering guidance for the professional writer and the beginner alike.

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR