Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died September 15, 2026, South Wellfleet, Massachusetts) was an American writer best known for her meditative essays on the natural world. In 1975 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her nonfiction work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, an essay collection based on her observations of the creeks and woods of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Roanoke, Virginia.

Background and education

Doak grew up in Pittsburgh in a wealthy family; her father was an executive at the plumbing fixtures corporation American Standard, which was founded by one of her ancestors. She attended Hollins College in Virginia (B.A., 1967; M.A., 1968) and wrote her master’s thesis on the 19th-century American nature writer and Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. During her sophomore year she married Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor. She was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham from 1975 to 1978 and on the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1980 to 2002, when she retired as professor emerita.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and other books

Dillard’s first published book was a collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974). It was as an essayist, however, that she earned critical as well as popular acclaim. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), she distilled from keen observations of her own habitat the essential enigmas of religious mysticism. Although the environment she described was a suburban one, Dillard’s focus on its natural details is so intense that her writing reveals the wilderness found in everyday surroundings. Critics hailed the work as an American original in the spirit of Thoreau’s Walden. Others, including novelist Eudora Welty, criticized the book for its lack of discussion about contemporary events and its narrow concentration on Dillard’s perspective.

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A Study of Poetry

The books Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) explore similar themes. The first of these was written after Dillard moved to Washington state to escape the intrusive fame she encountered with the success of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. During this time she divorced her first husband and married anthropologist Gary Clevidence. She and Clevidence had one child and later divorced; Dillard later wed Thoreau scholar Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

In 1979 Dillard moved to Connecticut, although Teaching a Stone to Talk draws from recollections of her time in Washington, including an influential essay about her experience viewing a total solar eclipse through a pair of welder’s goggles. The book also contains pieces about her visits to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands and her attempt to encounter the divine at a Roman Catholic mass.

Her other nonfiction books include Living by Fiction (1982), Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984), and The Writing Life (1989), which present her views of literary craftsmanship and the writer’s role in society.

In 1987 Dillard published an autobiographical narrative, An American Childhood. When her first novel, The Living, appeared in 1992, reviewers found in its depictions of the logging culture of the turn-of-the-20th-century Pacific Northwest the same visionary realism that distinguished the author’s nonfiction. The Annie Dillard Reader was published in 1994 and Mornings Like This: Found Poems arrived in 1995. For the Time Being (1999) presents Dillard’s wide-ranging reflections on, among other subjects, the meaning of suffering and death and the nature of God. The novel The Maytrees (2007) takes as its subjects Lou and Toby Maytree, a married couple living on Cape Cod, where Dillard was then living. The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New was released in 2016.

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Additional honors

Dillard received the National Humanities Medal from U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2015. Her other honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1985). In 1999 Dillard became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.