Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (b. 30 April 1945) is an American author whose prose — characterised by an almost fanatical attentiveness to the physical world, a willingness to confront ultimate questions without the safety net of conventional piety, and a prose style that combines scientific precision with mystical intensity — has earned her a Pulitzer Prize, a place in the American literary canon, and a reputation as one of the finest essayists of the twentieth century. Her work asks, in various registers, a single question: what does it mean to be a conscious creature in a world of astonishing beauty and appalling suffering?

Early Life

Dillard was born Annie Doak in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into a prosperous family. She attended Hollins College in Virginia, where she studied creative writing and published her first book, a collection of poems titled Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974). But it was the Blue Ridge Mountains surrounding the college — and particularly Tinker Creek, a stream flowing through a valley near Roanoke — that provided the setting for the book that would make her famous.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

Dillard’s masterpiece is structured as a record of a year spent observing the natural world around Tinker Creek — but “observing” understates what the book actually does. Dillard watches a frog being slowly devoured from the inside by a giant water bug. She stalks muskrats. She examines the structure of insect wings, the patterns of creek water, the behaviour of praying mantises. She reads widely in natural history, theology, physics, and philosophy, and she brings everything she has read to bear on what she sees.

The result is a work of nature writing that transcends the genre. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has been compared to Thoreau’s Walden — both are books by solitary observers who use the natural world as a lens for metaphysical inquiry — but Dillard’s book is darker, stranger, and more willing to confront the horror built into the natural order. Her famous passage about the parasitic wasp that paralyses its prey and lays eggs inside the living body is not a digression but the centre of the book’s argument: nature is not benign, and any theology that ignores this fact is not serious.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975, when Dillard was twenty-nine.

Holy the Firm (1977)

Dillard’s shortest and most intense book — barely sixty pages — is a three-day meditation on suffering, beauty, and the nature of God, prompted by a plane crash near her home on an island in Puget Sound in which a child’s face was burned off. The book asks whether God is present in catastrophe, and if so, what kind of God that implies. The prose is compressed, liturgical, and incandescent — closer to prose poetry than to conventional essay writing.

Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982)

Dillard’s finest essay collection includes “Total Eclipse,” about a solar eclipse witnessed in the Yakima Valley — an essay that has been called one of the greatest American essays of the twentieth century — and “Living Like Weasels,” about an encounter with a wild weasel that becomes a meditation on instinct, consciousness, and the difference between human and animal ways of being in the world.

An American Childhood (1987)

Dillard’s memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s is her warmest and most accessible book — a loving, detailed, funny account of a childhood spent in a household of eccentrics, in a city of bridges and rivers and steep hills, with parents who encouraged curiosity and tolerated wildness. The book is a portrait of a consciousness coming into being: learning to notice, to attend, to see.

The Writing Life (1989)

A brief, fragmentary account of what it is actually like to write — the solitude, the discipline, the failures, the rare moments of breakthrough — that has become one of the most frequently cited books about the craft of writing.

Fiction and Later Work

Dillard’s novel The Living (1992) is a sprawling historical novel set in the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century. The Maytrees (2007) is a brief, compressed love story set in Provincetown. Neither achieved the impact of her nonfiction, but both demonstrate her formal versatility.

For the Time Being (1999) is her most philosophically ambitious work: a meditation on evil, suffering, and the nature of God that juxtaposes the discoveries of Teilhard de Chardin, the birth defects documented in a medical textbook, the sand grains of the Gobi Desert, and the buried terracotta warriors of Xi’an.

Legacy

Dillard’s influence on American nature writing and the personal essay is permanent. She demonstrated that close attention to the natural world could be a form of philosophical inquiry and that the essay could achieve the intensity and ambition of poetry.

Collecting Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974, Harper’s Magazine Press) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary Dillard collectible, valued at $200–$800. Holy the Firm (1977, Harper & Row) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982, Harper & Row) first editions are also sought. Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974, University of Missouri Press), her first book, is scarce.