John Nichols, who launched his literary career in his mid-20s with a pair of tragicomic novels but became best known for evoking New Mexico’s small towns and rural landscapes in books including “The Milagro Beanfield War,” was found dead Nov. 27 at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 83.
His daughter, Tania Harris, said he died Sunday night or Monday morning because of his long-running heart problems, which included atrial fibrillation. He had likened his heart to a “ticking time bomb,” she said, but had refused to move out of the dusty, beaten-down home where he had lived alone for years, maintaining a nocturnal schedule in which he wrote from 10 p.m. until 6 in the morning.
Mr. Nichols, a self-effacing novelist with a penchant for dark humor, liked to say that most of his two-dozen books were “wildly unsuccessful.” But a few earned him a cult following and a reputation as a leading chronicler of New Mexico, his adoptive home state, where he wrote with humor and pathos about the land and its people, including the tension between White developers and Chicano and Indigenous communities fighting to retain their heritage and their homes.
“He fell in love with the people, the air, the sky, the mountains. But he was keenly aware of the weight of history, and the historical inequity here among the Native peoples and the Spanish,” said Stephen Hull, the director of the University of New Mexico Press, which published nine of Mr. Nichols’s books.
Mr. Nichols started his career in New York, where made a living out of college playing the guitar in Greenwich Village coffee shops and selling cartoons — “mostly of naked ladies,” in his telling. He was just 24 when he published his first book, “The Sterile Cuckoo” (1965), a coming-of-age story that began like this: “Several years ago, during the spring semester of my junior year in college, as an alternative to either deserting or marrying a girl, I signed a suicide pact with her.”
The novel went on to recount the relationship between the narrator, a more or less conventional beer-guzzling student, and his eccentric girlfriend, Pookie Adams.
Reviews were mixed — in the New York Times, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that it was filled with “adolescent jabbering” — but the novel became a commercial success with the help of a 1969 film adaptation that marked Alan J. Pakula’s directorial debut and featured an Oscar-nominated breakout performance by Liza Minnelli.
By the time the film was released, Mr. Nichols had published another coming-of-age story, “The Wizard of Loneliness” (1966), about a precocious 11-year-old on the home front during World War II. (The book was adapted into a 1988 film.) He had also moved to Taos, where he worked for a muckraking alternative newspaper called the New Mexico Review, reporting on land and water issues in the state’s rural north.
His reporting provided the inspiration for “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1974), a comic novel about a Latino community’s efforts to prevent its town from being transformed into an upscale vacation resort.
“At the time, that book seemed like my last shot at a literary career,” Mr. Nichols wrote in an autobiographical essay. He was broke after spending a few years unsuccessfully trying to publish a political novel, inspired by his burgeoning opposition to capitalism and the Vietnam War. His frustrations faded after he wrote a first draft of “Milagro” in five weeks, but his excitement about the novel’s commercial prospects turned into disappointment when the book turned out to be “a dismal failure,” he told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “It got reviewed, but it disappeared.”
Critics found “Milagro” overwritten and clichéd. Gradually, it found an audience of readers who admired its dark humor, underdog plot and evocative descriptions of a fictional New Mexico backwater. A 1988 film adaptation, directed by Robert Redford, drew further attention to the book, which inspired the names of a Milagro bed-and-breakfast and Milagro art gallery in Taos.
The film, which starred Rubén Blades as a friendly sheriff and Christopher Walken as a menacing lawman, was filmed in nearby Truchas, from a screenplay that Mr. Nichols co-wrote with David Ward. Mr. Nichols said he came around to the production after failing to prevent Redford from getting involved, explaining in a 2022 memoir, “I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer”: “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.”
Mr. Nichols wrote two sequels, “The Magic Journey” (1978) and “The Nirvana Blues” (1981), in what he called his New Mexico Trilogy. But he came to consider “Milagro” “an albatross around my neck,” lamenting that readers seemed more keen on reading another one of his comic novels than in engaging with his later work, which often focused on politics and the environment.
Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 1994, he said he had been politicized by a trip to Guatemala three decades earlier, when he encountered widespread poverty and became critical of U.S. involvement abroad. He later protested the Vietnam War by demonstrating outside the Pentagon, traveled to Nicaragua to see the effects of the country’s left-wing revolution and published a bleak and violent antiwar novel, “American Blood” (1987).
Mr. Nichols also dabbled in screenwriting, doing an uncredited rewrite of “Missing” (1982), a Costa-Gavras thriller based on the case of the American writer and filmmaker Charles Horman, who was murdered in Chile days after the 1973 U.S.-backed coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The film starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek and received four Oscar nominations, winning for best adapted screenplay.
“The ‘real’ Hollywood has remained a mostly unknown foreign country to me,” Mr. Nichols wrote in his memoir, looking back on other assignments, uncredited or unrealized, for directors including Costa-Gavras and Ridley Scott. “I existed on its very fringe, picking up crumbs that fell off the table. … I once explained it like this: ‘I never jumped over the moon, but, when nobody was looking, I did run away with the spoon.’”
John Treadwell Nichols was born in Berkeley, Calif., on July 23, 1940. He had the same name as his paternal grandfather, a naturalist who was the curator of fishes at the American Museum of Natural History, and spent childhood summers at his grandparents’ 18th-century estate in Mastic, N.Y., on the South Shore of Long Island.
His mother, Monique Robert, was French, a granddaughter of the poet Anatole Le Braz. Like Mr. Nichols, she was plagued by heart problems; she died at 27, when he was 2. He later memorialized her in one of his nonfiction books, “Goodbye, Monique: Requiem for a Brief Marriage” (2019). His father, David, married three more times and taught psychology at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Mr. Nichols graduated from the Loomis boarding school in Connecticut, where he captained the hockey team and wrote gangster stories in his spare time, imitating Damon Runyon. By the time he enrolled at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., he was writing “at least one novel a year,” by his count.
“Occasionally, a brave professor would be kind enough to read my stuff, then offer encouraging words as he or she politely vomited behind my back.”
Mr. Nichols received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1962 and spent a year in Barcelona, where he began writing “The Sterile Cuckoo” while teaching English. He settled in Taos in 1969, during a period of personal and artistic upheaval.
“For some reason, the East had overwhelmed me. … But in New Mexico, my relationships soon cut through class lines and occupations,” he wrote in “If Mountains Die: A New Mexico Memoir” (1979).
His marriages to Ruth Harding, Juanita Wolf and Miel Castagna ended in divorce. Survivors include two children from his first marriage, Luke Nichols and Tania Harris; a half brother; and three granddaughters.
Friends and family members said that Mr. Nichols’s home was stuffed with books, letters and manuscripts, including drafts of abandoned projects and novels that he spent years polishing and reworking. “Most of the books I have completed were never published,” he noted in a 2000 essay, “yet this has not dismayed me. It’s no small thing to build a body of work, even if much of that work remains anonymous.”