Dec 30, 2009
Meta Ann Doak was born into an upper-middle-class family on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She and her two younger sisters were raised under the influences of their free-thinking parents, their wealthy paternal grandparents who lived nearby, and an African-American domestic servant. ‘‘Annie’’ was encouraged from the beginning to think and act independently, to tell stories, and to read books. She took piano and dance lessons, socialized at the country club, and attended the Ellis School, a private school for girls where she studied Latin, French, and German. But she had a keen interest in the natural world even as a girl, and assembled collections of rocks, bugs, and other elements of nature, as well as a collection of favorite poems. Dillard has recounted her early years in an autobiography, An American Childhood (1987).
Dillard’s high school years were turbulent. Like many teenagers, she took up smoking and driving fast, and wrote angry poetry about the hypocrisy and emotional impoverishment of the adults around her. For a time, she even stopped attending the Presbyterian Church she had belonged to since childhood, but she soon felt the loss and returned. Dillard’s struggle to understand God and religion and her fascination with poetic language—even her smoking—surface throughout her writing, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
After high school, Dillard attended Hollins College, a women’s college near Roanoke, Virginia, and studied creative writing and religion. At the end of her sophomore year, she married one of her creative writing professors, Richard Dillard. Richard was a strong influence on her writing, encouraging her to develop her skills as a poet and a natural historian. During the marriage, Dillard finished her undergraduate degree in English literature and completed a master’s. The topic of her master’s thesis was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). Later, she would use Walden as the model for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
For the next few years, Dillard painted, wrote poetry, read widely, volunteered at local community agencies, and kept extensive journals of her observations and thoughts. In 1973, she turned those journals into Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, working as many as fifteen hours a day to complete the manuscript. She described the process of writing the book in The Writing Life (1989). Individual chapters of Pilgrim were published as essays in influential magazines, and when the full book was published in 1974, it was an immediate success. The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. At the time Annie Dillard was just thirty years old. She eventually divorced Dillard and, in 1980, married writer Gary Clevidence.
Over the past quarter century, Dillard has published eight more books, including a novel, two collections of poetry, and several nonfiction volumes. These books have been well received, but Dillard is still known primarily as the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She married another professor and writer, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., in 1988.
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