Kidder, author of Rough Sleepers, attended Harvard University before studying at the University of Iowa and obtaining a Master of Fine Arts. He’s written 11 creative nonfiction books as of 2023, all of which explore the landscape of humanity. Kidder immerses himself in the world of his subjects. In Rough Sleepers, he details riding through the streets of Boston, and for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, he immersed himself in the world of computer engineers as they raced to build a microcomputer.

He also wrote a book called My Detachment (2005), which tells the story of his time as an Army intelligence officer in Vietnam. In 1993, Kidder wrote in a blog post for The Washington Post, “In reality, believability may have nothing to do with reality or even plausibility. It has everything to do with those things in nonfiction. I think that the nonfiction writer’s fundamental job is to make what is true believable” (Kidder, Tracy. “The Writing Life.” The Washington Post, 5 Sept. 1993). This offers a philosophy for his inclusion of creativity in nonfiction.