The Living was published by HarperCollins in 1992 and is Annie Dillard’s only novel — a large, ambitious historical fiction spanning forty years in the Bellingham Bay region of Washington Territory (later Washington State), from the first white settlements of the 1850s through the boom and bust of the 1890s. It follows three families — the Fishburns, the Obenchains, and the Honers — through the relentless processes of frontier life: clearing forest, building towns, losing children to disease, and confronting the absolute indifference of the natural world to human aspiration.
The Novel
The novel’s method is accumulative rather than linear. Dillard follows multiple characters across decades, showing how communities form, dissolve, and reform on the Pacific Northwest frontier. The landscape is both magnificent and lethal: the old-growth forests are cathedral-like but crushing (trees fall on people, stumps refuse to burn, the forest regrows as fast as it’s cleared); the water is beautiful but drowns children; the mountains are sublime but isolating.
Death is constant and arbitrary. Children die of diphtheria. Men die under falling timber. Women die in childbirth. The novel refuses to make these deaths meaningful — they simply happen, as they happened to real frontier communities, and the survivors continue because there is no alternative.
The central conflict involves Beal Obenchain, who tells the settler Clare Fishburn that he will kill him — someday, at an unspecified time. This death sentence (which may or may not be serious) forces Fishburn to confront his own mortality and, through him, forces the novel to ask its central question: how do you live knowing you will die?
Themes
This is the question from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek translated into fiction — how to be present to the world’s beauty and violence simultaneously, how to live intensely in the knowledge of death. Dillard’s answer (here as in the essays) is attention: you live by looking, by noticing, by being fully present to each moment even as you know it will end.
Collecting The Living
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 1992): Cloth binding with dust jacket.
Identification points:
- HarperCollins imprint
- “First Edition” with number line
- 397 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $50–$150. Large first printing from a major publisher.
Signed copies: $200–$400. Dillard signed at events during the 1992 promotion.
As Dillard’s only novel, the book occupies a unique place in her bibliography — the extension of her vision into fiction, demonstrating that her method (intense attention to the physical world) could sustain narrative as well as meditation.