Annie Dillard

An American Childhood

Background

• Born, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• Educated at Hollins College in Virginia.
• Lived nearly 10 years in the Roanoke Valley, whose landscape inspired Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

Career

• Generally considered an essayist and one of the premier prose stylists of her time, but has also written poetry, autobiography, fiction, and criticism.
• Characteristic subject matter is nature and the world around her; her prose, though lucid and grounded in specificity, is sometimes lyrical and metaphorical. Sometimes compared in her early writings to Henry David Thoreau.
• Spent many years as a Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University
• Pilgrim At Tinker Creek (1974) received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Major Writings

Essays/Nature Writing
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
Holy the Firm (1977)
Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

Autobiography
An American Childhood (1987)

Poetry
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974)

Writing and Criticism
Living By Fiction (1982)
The Writing Life (1989)

Fiction
The Living (1992)

Critical Sources and Reviews

• Biographical and critical information in multiple volumes of Contemporary Authors and Contemporary Literary Criticism, including CA, 49-52; CA--New Revision Series, 3 and 43; CLC 9 and 60; and Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1980.

• Some reviews of An American Childhood:
  • New York Times Book Review, September 27, 1987 ("Her Inexhaustible Mind" by Noel Perrin.)
  • Chicago Tribune-Books, September 13, 1987 (excerpted in CLC, 60)
  • Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 20, 1987 (excerpted in CLC, 60)