Writer John Nichols, author of ‘The Milagro Beanfield War’ with a social justice streak, dies at 83

SANTA FE, N.M. — Writer John Nichols, best known for his populist novel, “The Milagro Beanfield War,” has died. He was 83.

Nichols died Monday at home in Taos, New Mexico, amid declining health linked to a long-term heart condition, said daughter Tania Harris of Albuquerque.

Nichols won early recognition with the 1965 publication of his offbeat love story “The Sterile Cuckoo,” later made into a movie starring Liza Minnelli. 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.

He moved in 1969 with his first wife from New York City to northern New Mexico, where he found inspiration for a trilogy of novels anchored in the success of “The Milagro Beanfield War.”

That novel — about a fictional Hispanic 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. It was turned into a movie directed by Robert Redford, starring Rubén Blades and Christopher Walken, with scores of local residents on camera in Truchas, New Mexico, as extras.

“My sense it that he wrote that as a valentine to northern New Mexico. … He really became embedded in Taos and Chama and all the towns in northern New Mexico,” said Stephen Hull, director of the University of New Mexico Press, which last year published Nichols’ memoir under the self-deprecating title, “I Got Mine: Confessions of a Midlist Writer.”

“He wrote it as a gringo — an ‘Anglo’ — but he wrote it with real life experience and it seems to me with a great deal of authenticity,” Hull said.

Nichols’ published works include at least 13 novels along with nonfiction ranging from collected essays, original photography, a chronicle of his parents’ early life and more.

He lived alone after three marriages in a Taos home stacked with papers and manuscripts, amid an enduring work routine that involved writing through the night, according to friends and relatives.