Writing with Power, by Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press)
Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Story Press)
Tough, Sweet and Stuffy, by Walker Gibson (Indiana University Press)
The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life, by Walt Harrington (Sage)
On Writing, by Stephen King (Scribner)
Telling True Stories, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call (Plume)
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (Pantheon)
The Forest for the Trees, by Betsy Lerner (Riverhead)
Unless It Moves the Human Heart, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco)
Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas and Mark Turner (Princeton University Press)
Word Court, by Barbara Wallraff (Harcourt)
Style, by Joseph M. Williams and Gregory G. Colomb (Longman)
On Writing Well, by William Zinsser (Harper & Row)
The Chicago Manual of Style, by University of Chicago Press staff (University of Chicago Press)
Modern English Usage, by H. W. Fowler, revised edition by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press)
Modern American Usage, by Wilson Follett (Hill and Wang)
Words into Type, by Marjorie E. Skillin and Robert M. Gay (Prentice-Hall)
To CHRIS, SAMMY, NICK, AND MADDIE, AND TO TOMMY, JAMIE, THEODORE, AND PENNY
We wish to thank Kate Medina, Betsy Lerner, Georges Borchardt, and Chris Jerome for their generosity, enthusiasm, and guidance. We are grateful to Anna Pitoniak, Evan Camfield, and London King of Random House, and to the writers Stuart Dybek, Tom French, Darcy Frey, Diane Hume George, Pamela Haag, Michael Janeway, Suzannah Lessard, Michael Ponsor, and Barbara Wallraff. Above all, we owe thanks to our families for their patience and wisdom.
ALSO BY TRACY KIDDER
The Soul of a New Machine
House
Among Schoolchildren
Old Friends
Home Town
Mountains Beyond Mountains
My Detachment
ALSO BY RICHARD TODD
The Thing Itself
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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 Strength in What Remains, My Detachment, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Home Town, Old Friends, Among Schoolchildren, House, and The Soul of a New Machine, Kidder lives in Massachusetts and Maine.
RICHARD TODD has been a magazine and book editor for more than forty years. He was executive editor of The Atlantic Monthly and published books under his own imprint at Houghton Mifflin. He has contributed reportage and cultural criticism to a number of magazines, and is the author of The Thing Itself. He has taught at Amherst and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts; currently he is on the faculty of the Goucher College MFA program.