What Do I Read Next?
- Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854, served as Dillard’s primary inspiration for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In Walden, Thoreau recounts the two years he spent living alone in a cabin by Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, documenting his reflections and observations of nature through the changing seasons.
- Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1982) is a collection of essays by Dillard. These works, akin to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, focus on observing and contemplating the natural world but extend beyond Virginia to places as distant as Ecuador.
- The Writing Life, published in 1989, delves into Dillard’s personal creative journey and her quest to understand inspiration. She blends literal and metaphorical stories, including the narrative of how she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
- Terry Tempest Williams’ An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (1995) is a collection of essays exploring the connections between nature and our spiritual lives. Most of Williams’s essays are set in the American West, and unlike Dillard, she consistently acknowledges her role within a human community.
- Another seminal work in American nature writing is Henry Beston’s 1928 book The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. This book details a year—from one autumn to the next—that Beston spent living alone in a one-room house on the Atlantic Ocean’s shore.
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