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| John Nichols (courtesy Milkweed) |
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John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War and other works and a longtime resident of New Mexico, died on November 27 at age 83.
Altogether Nichols wrote more than a dozen novels, as well as nonfiction that included collected essays, original photography, a chronicle of his parents' early life, and more.
In 1965, he published The Sterile Cuckoo, which was made into a 1969 movie directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Liza Minnelli. As the Guardian noted, "The coming-of-age book and subsequent movie were set amid private Northeastern colleges that were a familiar milieu to Nichols, who attended boarding school in Connecticut and private college in upstate New York."
His best-known novel, The Milagro Beanfield War, was published in 1974 and was the beginning of the New Mexico Trilogy. The Guardian said that the book--"about a fictional Latino agricultural community in the mountains of northern New Mexico, a scheme by business interests to usurp the town's land and water supply, and the spontaneous rebellion that ensues--won widespread recognition for its mix of humor, sense of place and themes of social justice." In 1988, it was made into a film produced by Robert Redford and starring Rubén Blades and Christopher Walken.
Stephen Hull, director of the University of New Mexico Press, told the New York Times: "A lot of his work might be characterized as a long slow-motion valentine to the mountains, mesas, high desert, sky and especially people of New Mexico. He was a comic writer who used tropes of absurdism and excess to depict essential injustices."
His other books included the other two titles in the New Mexico trilogy--The Magic Journey and The Nirvana Blues--and a memoir, I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer, published last year by the University of New Mexico Press.