Annie Dillard (born Annie Doak on April 30, 1945) is an American writer known for her stories and nonfiction writing. She has written poetry, essays, stories, and literary criticism. She also wrote two novels and one memoir. Her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975. From 1980 to 2001, she taught for 21 years in the English department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Early life

Annie Dillard was born on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her parents were Frank and Pam Doak, and she is the oldest of three sisters.

Details about her early life come from her autobiography, An American Childhood (1987). In this book, Dillard describes growing up in the 1950s in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where she lived with her family in a house filled with people who enjoyed telling jokes. The book explains how she moved from being focused only on herself to becoming more aware of the world around her. She described her mother as someone who did not follow traditional rules and was full of energy. Her father taught her about many subjects, including plumbing, economics, and the details of the book On the Road. However, by the time she became an adolescent, she realized that her parents were not always correct.

In her autobiography, Dillard mentions reading about many different topics, such as geology, natural history, entomology, epidemiology, and poetry. Some books that had a strong influence on her as a child were The Natural Way to Draw and Field Book of Ponds and Streams. These books helped her connect with the present moment and provided a way to escape from daily life, respectively. Her days were filled with activities like exploring, taking piano and dance classes, collecting rocks and insects, drawing, and reading books from the public library. These books included works about natural history and military history, such as those related to World War II.

As a child, Dillard attended the Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, even though her parents did not go to church. She also spent four summers at the First Presbyterian Church (FPC) Camp in Ligonier, Pennsylvania. However, as a teenager, she stopped attending church, saying she felt there was hypocrisy. When she told her minister about her decision, he gave her four books containing C. S. Lewis’s radio talks. She appreciated Lewis’s thoughts on suffering but felt the topic was not fully explained in the books.

Dillard attended Pittsburgh Public Schools until fifth grade. After that, she went to The Ellis School and continued there until she finished college.

Education

Dillard attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied English, theology, and creative writing. She said, "In college, I learned how to learn from others. Writing in college, for me, was not about what little Annie had to say, but what Wallace Stevens had to say. I did not go to college to think my own thoughts; I went to learn what had already been thought." She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1967 and a Master of Arts degree in 1968. Her Master's thesis focused on Henry David Thoreau and explained how Walden Pond served as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth."

After graduating, Dillard spent the first few years painting, writing, and keeping a journal. Several of her poems and short stories were published during this time. She also worked for Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty program, which aimed to reduce poverty.

From 1975 to 1978, Dillard held a special position as a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

Dillard has since received honorary doctorate degrees from Boston College, Connecticut College, and the University of Hartford.

Career

Dillard’s writing has been compared to works by Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and John Donne. She has also named Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Graham Greene, George Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway as some of her favorite authors.

In her first book of poems, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), Dillard expressed ideas that she later explored in her prose writing.

Dillard’s journals were the basis for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), a nonfiction book about the natural world near her home in Roanoke, Virginia. The book has named chapters, but it is not a collection of essays, as some people thought. Early parts of the book were published in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Sports Illustrated. The book describes God by studying nature. One critic called her “one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th Century.” Eudora Welty, writing in The New York Times, said the work showed “a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled… [an] intensity of experience that she seems to live in order to declare,” but she also said she did not always understand what Dillard was writing about.

The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard was 28 years old when she won, making her the youngest woman to receive the award.

At one point, Dillard began a project to write about everything that happened on Lummi Island over three days. When a plane crashed on the second day, she started thinking about the problem of pain and how God allows “natural evil to happen.”

Holy the Firm (1977) is a short book, only 66 pages long. It took Dillard 14 months to write, working full-time. In The New York Times Book Review, novelist Frederick Buechner called it “a rare and precious book.” Some critics wondered if Dillard was influenced by hallucinogenic drugs while writing it. Dillard said she was not.

Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) is a book of 14 short nonfiction essays and travel stories. The essay “Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos” won the New York Women’s Press Club award. “Total Eclipse” was included in Best American Essays of the [20th] Century (2000). Dillard noted that “The Weasel is lots of fun; the much-botched church service is (I think) hilarious.” After the first edition of the book, the order of essays was changed. Initially, “Living Like Weasels” was first, followed by “An Expedition to the Pole.” “Total Eclipse” was placed between “On a Hill Far Away” and “Lenses.”

The essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk are:
• “Total Eclipse”
• “An Expedition to the Pole”
• “In the Jungle”
• “Living Like Weasels”
• “The Deer at Providencia”
• “Teaching a Stone to Talk”
• “On a Hill Far Away”
• “Lenses”
• “Life on the Rocks: The Galapagos”
• “A Field of Silence”
• “God in the Doorway”
• “Mirages”
• “Sojourner”
• “Aces and Eights”

In Living by Fiction (1982), Dillard explained her theory about why character and narrative in literature cannot be flattened, as happened in the visual arts when they moved away from deep space to the picture plane. She later said that writing this book made her want to write an old-fashioned novel.

Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984) is a work of journalism. One part describes Dillard’s time in China, where she was part of a group of six American writers and publishers after the fall of the Gang of Four. In the second part, she hosted a group of Chinese writers, taking them to Disneyland with Allen Ginsberg. Dillard called the experience “hilarious.”

The Writing Life (1989) is a collection of short essays in which Dillard discusses how, where, and why she writes. The Boston Globe called it “a kind of spiritual Strunk & White, a small and brilliant guidebook to the landscape of a writer’s task.” The Chicago Tribune said it gives nonwriters a glimpse into the challenges and rewards of a life with words and offers writers a warm conversation with a talented colleague. The Detroit News called it “a spare volume… that has the power and force of a detonating bomb.” According to a biography written by her husband, Robert D. Richardson, Dillard “repudiates The Writing Life, except for the last chapter, the true story of stunt pilot Dave Rahm.”

Dillard’s first novel, The Living (1992), is about the first European settlers of the Pacific Northwest coast. While writing the book, she avoided reading works that were written after the time period she was writing about and did not use words that would be anachronistic.

Mornings Like This (1995) is a book dedicated to found poetry. Dillard used phrases from old books to create poems that are often ironic. The poems are not connected to the themes of the original books. Dillard said, “A good trick should look hard and be easy. These poems were a bad trick. They look easy and are really hard.”

For the Time Being (1999) is a work of narrative nonfiction. The book’s topics include “birth, sand, China, clouds, numbers, Israel, encounters, thinker, evil, and now.” Dillard wrote, “I quit the Catholic Church and Christianity; I stay near Christianity and Hasidism.”

The Maytrees (2007) is Dillard’s second novel. The story begins after World War II and follows a lifelong love between a husband and wife who live in Provincetown, Cape Cod. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2008.

The Abundance, a collection of essays curated by Dillard, was published in 2017.

In 1975, Dillard moved to the Pacific Northwest and taught for four years at Fairhaven College and Western Washington University. In 1980, she began teaching in the English department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where she worked until she retired as Professor Emerita in 2002.

Awards and honors

Dillard's books have been translated into at least 10 languages. Her 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was listed in Random House's survey of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century. The Los Angeles Times survey of the 100 best Western novels of the century includes The Living. The list of the 100 best spiritual books of the century (edited by Philip Zaleski) also includes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The list of the 100 best essays (edited by Joyce Carol Oates) includes the essay "Total Eclipse" from Teaching a Stone to Talk. Translators of two of Dillard's books—Sabine Porte and Pierre Gault—won Maurice-Edgar Cointreau Prizes in France for their translations. Gault's translation of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as Pélerinage à Tinker Creek won in 1999, and Porte's translation of For the Time Being as Au Présent won in 2002.

To celebrate its city's 100th anniversary in 1984, the Boston Symphony commissioned Sir Michael Tippett to compose a symphony. He used parts of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as the text for the symphony.

In 1997, Dillard was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame for her work in writing and journalism.

In 2000, Dillard's For the Time Being received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

In 2005, artist Jenny Holzer used An American Childhood, along with three other books, in her light-based artwork "For Pittsburgh," displayed at the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh.

The New York Times listed Maytrees among the top ten books published in 2007.

On September 10, 2015, Dillard was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

Personal life

In 1965, when she was 20 years old, Dillard married her creative writing professor, Richard Dillard. In 1975, they divorced in a friendly way, and she moved from Roanoke to Lummi Island near Bellingham, Washington.

In 1976, she married Gary Clevidence, an anthropology professor at Fairhaven College. They have a child, Cody Rose, who was born in 1984. Dillard and Clevidence remained married until 1988.

In 1988, Dillard married historical biographer Robert D. Richardson. She met him after sending him a letter about his book Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. They were married until Richardson’s death in 2020.

After college, Dillard said she explored many different spiritual beliefs. Her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, includes references to Christ and the Bible, as well as to Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Inuit spirituality. For a time, she converted to Roman Catholicism around 1988. This was described in detail in a 1992 article in The New York Times about her work.

In 1994, she won the Campion Award, which is given annually to a Catholic writer by the editors of America magazine. In her 1999 book, For the Time Being, she describes her decision to leave Christianity. She questions some Christian beliefs but still respects Christianity and values the work of Catholic writer Teilhard de Chardin. Her personal website lists her religion as "none."

Sales of Dillard’s paintings support Partners in Health, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that helps improve healthcare worldwide. It was founded by Dr. Paul Farmer.

Major works

• 1974 – Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (ISBN 0-8195-6536-9)
• 1974 – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (ISBN 0-06-095302-0)
• 1977 – Holy The Firm (ISBN 0-06-091543-9)
• 1982 – Living By Fiction (ISBN 0-06-091544-7)
• 1982 – Teaching a Stone To Talk (ISBN 0-06-091541-2)
• 1984 – Encounters with Chinese Writers (ISBN 0-8195-6156-8)
• 1987 – An American Childhood (ISBN 0-06-091518-8)
• 1989 – The Writing Life (ISBN 0-06-091988-4)
• 1992 – The Living (ISBN 0-06-092411-X)
• 1995 – Mornings Like This: Found Poems (ISBN 0-06-092725-9)
• 1999 – For the Time Being (ISBN 0-375-40380-9)
• 2007 – The Maytrees (ISBN 0-06-123953-4)
• 2016 – The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old & New (ISBN 0-06-243297-4)