Acclaimed author John Nichols dies at 83

Nov. 28—Author John Nichols, whose rollicking and passionate books about Northern New Mexico helped draw a spotlight to both its promise and problems, lived life on his own terms — writing almost up to the day he died.

"He took [writing] serious as hard, hard work," Nichols' daughter, Tania Harris, said in an interview Tuesday. "He worked tirelessly on novels, sometimes over the course of 10 years."

Considered by many as one of the finest writing talents of his generation but less appreciated for the tireless work he put into every passage, Nichols died Monday of heart-related problems in his Taos home, Harris said.

He was 83.

Engaging, political and funny, Nichols wrote several fiction and non-fiction works but is best known for 1974's The Milagro Beanfield War, a galvanizing tale about the collision between old and new in New Mexico, issues that face the state even today. The book gained added notoriety thanks to a 1988 film adaptation directed by Robert Redford.

But Milagro's popularity may have been eclipsed by Nichols' devotion to other works — both fiction and non-fiction — many of them focused on the beauty and challenges facing the people, customs and land of the state.

"I hope his legacy will be his enduring love letter to New Mexico," said Stephen Hull, director of the University of New Mexico Press, which published Nichols' memoir, I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer, in 2022.

Nichols got his, all right, and the memoir's title was a wry, double-edged commentary both on the often quixotic nature of his literary career — lots of books, some OK royalty checks, frustration dealing with literacy critics, editors and Hollywood — and the joy he experienced through writing.

"Unreasonable persistence," he wrote in his memoir, describing his way of surviving hurdle after hurdle, pothole after pothole, critical attack after critical attack. One portion of his memoir includes a number of critical reviews attacking his many books — revealing a man, perhaps in pain, sharing it with others while continually facing off against it.

The first book in a trilogy of New Mexico stories, Milagro developed a cult following and continues to be a literary barometer of the state's cultural identity.

"It was a dismal failure," Nichols told The New Mexican in a 2021 interview. "It got reviewed, but it disappeared."

In his memoir, he relates, with great self-amusement, the many creative, artistic and emotional sinkholes he got sucked into as he worked to help translate the novel to film with Redford.

"I didn't want a famous, blond, blue-eyed Anglo actor directing the film of a book written by another blond, blue-eyed gringo, a novel in which half the characters spoke Spanish," he wrote in his memoir.

But he had little say over the matter, and the film version brought grief to Nichols, who was criticized for bringing the movie production to New Mexico (not his idea) and disrupting the rural lives of the very people he was trying to honor with his book.

If nothing else, Nichols developed a thick skin, brushing off criticism as part of the price you pay to have a voice. He said he didn't care what critics thought of his works, including The Sterile Cuckoo and The Wizard of Loneliness, written before he became associated with New Mexico. Both were made into films.

"I write what I want," he said in The New Mexican interview.

Born in July 1940 in Berkeley, Calif., Nichols first visited New Mexico in the summer of 1957. He spent a week in Taos "plastering a friend's adobe house," as he put it in an introduction to the book A Fragile Beauty: John Nichols' Milagro Country.

Among other jobs in the summer of '57, he worked at a New York Museum of Natural History research station in Arizona, put in time as a ranch hand and carpenter and helped collect beetles, bugs and butterflies for scientists.

Whether he knew it or not, his love affair with the Southwest had been fired up, and soon he was seeding his own future as a writer as he began thinking of writing a novel about the Southwest.

During his senior year at a prep school, he had written a 40-page story called The Journey, which he later described as a "distant preview of The Milagro Beanfield War."

He kept writing as a teenager and developed a knack for writing at night, a trait he maintained for decades. He moved to New York City in the 1960s, where he fell in with political movements — including protests against the Vietnam War — traveled the world and, of course, wrote.

A 1964 visit to Guatemala City thrust him face first into a world of civil unrest, military dictatorship, poverty and barefoot people with no teeth and filarial worms in their eyelids begging for money. The experience infused him with a new political mindset and a desire to set things right — or at least speak up when he saw social injustice and environmental damage at play.

He came back to the United States and began writing — or trying to write — novels that "tried to incorporate left polemics. ... The books were angry (and unsuccessful) diatribes against our economic culture of planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption."

He left New York for New Mexico, where the new environment, he wrote, "fired up my energy and gifted a new life I had not dreamed of."

He continued to write — about two dozen books in all — and became involved in local political and environmental causes while finding time to marry and divorce (three times) and become a major figure in the literary landscape of the state.

Santa Fe screenwriter and producer Kirk Ellis, who first met Nichols about 20 years ago when they met to discuss optioning the latter's novel The Magic Journey, said Milagro "came out of John's honest belief that the people who were the closest to the lands and had the most natural connection to the earth were being pushed out by other interests."

Ellis called The Magic Journey, the second in Nichols' New Mexico trilogy, "a great American novel about America's lack of tradition, the way we want to grow and replace things, let things die out rather than nurture our traditions in the slower way of life." He said that approach spoke to Nichols' disposition.

Regarding Nichols' embrace of the way of living in New Mexico, Hull said the author "loved his neighbors, he loved the people, he loved the landscape, he loved the mountains, he loved the sky, he loved everything about it. And I think that comes through in his writing."

Still, for Nichols there were were frustrating flirtations with the film world, including his work on the screenplay for director Costa-Gavras on the critically acclaimed 1982 film Missing. Despite contributing to the story about futile efforts to find out who was behind the killings of two Americans during the 1973 military coup in Chile, an action that had U.S. backing, Nichols found himself arbitrated out of a credit, as he put it in his memoir.

Hollywood, he wrote, remained a "mostly unknown foreign country to me. I existed on its very fringe, picking up crumbs that fell off the table."

In later years, Nichols suffered from health problems and joked about being involved in the planning of his own death since at least 2016. Just a few years ago, he said he was still writing every night from about 10 p.m. until 6 a.m.

Much of the last part of his memoir is taken up with his health challenges, including enduring open-heart surgery and dealing with a double hernia operation.

His daughter said he had been living on "borrowed time" for years and he kept on reminding friends and family members he might not be around much longer.

"He had been warning us for a good 10 years, so we didn't know when to take it seriously," Harris said. "Physically, he really lost a lot of his physical prowess, getting around, which took away a lot of what he loved — just being able to be out in nature," she said.

Hull said he received a letter from Nichols about two weeks ago in which he sounded "chipper, funny" as he contemplated relocating to Albuquerque.

Ellis said Nichols was "funny as hell, that comes across in his books. In person he was even funnier." Recalling Nichols taking part in readings of his own work on book tours, he said "he didn't just read those books, he performed those books as the narrator in third person passages and as the characters themselves. He was really, really remarkable."

Hull described Nichols as "resolutely anti-commercial" and a man who did not take his work or life seriously.

"I hope in the future he is read more," Hull said.

There's plenty to read, as his daughter discovered when she visited her father's home after his death and found new manuscripts, old manuscripts waiting for a rewrite and parts of a daily journal he kept since he was a teen.

Finishing his memoir a few years ago, Nichols pretty much capped it off with: "I still put my nose to a grindstone every night, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. I mean, I'm still alive, what else should I do? Writing has been how I breathe."

Besides Harris, Nichols is survived by son-in-law Marco Harris, a son, Luke Nichols, and granddaughters Lucy Nichols, Solana Harris and Sierra Harris.