Dillard, Annie (Vol. 9) | Dillard, Annie 1945–
Dillard, Annie 1945–
An American columnist and poet, Dillard is best known for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, for which she won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)
"I am no scientist," says Annie Dillard, "but a poet and a walker with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." In "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" she offers "what Thoreau called 'a meteorological journal of the mind.'"
The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. A blind child the author happened to read about saw for the first time after cataracts had been removed from her eyes. "When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw 'the tree with lights in it.'" Annie Dillard had found the central metaphor for her book; it is the vision, the spiritual conception, that she will spend her days in solitude tramping...
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