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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)
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Retired Discussion Series
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