Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American writer best known for her meditative essays on the natural world.

Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia (B.A., 1967; M.A., 1968). She was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham from 1975 to 1978 and on the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1980 to 2002, when she retired as professor emerita.

Dillard’s first published book was a collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974). It was as an essayist, however, that she earned critical as well as popular acclaim. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), she distilled from keen observations of her own habitat the essential enigmas of religious mysticism. Critics hailed the work as an American original in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Holy the Firm (1977) and Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) explore similar themes. Living by Fiction (1982), Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984), and The Writing Life (1989) present her views of literary craftsmanship and the writer’s role in society.

Britannica Quiz

American Writers Quiz

Dillard published an autobiographical narrative, An American Childhood, in 1987. When her first novel, The Living, appeared in 1992, reviewers found in its depictions of the logging culture of the turn-of-the-20th-century Pacific Northwest the same visionary realism that distinguished the author’s nonfiction. The Annie Dillard Reader was published in 1994 and Mornings Like This: Found Poems arrived in 1995. For the Time Being (1999) presents Dillard’s wide-ranging reflections on, among other subjects, the meaning of suffering and death and the nature of God. The novel The Maytrees (2007) takes as its subjects Lou and Toby Maytree, a married couple living on Cape Cod. The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New was released in 2016.

Dillard received the National Humanities Medal from U.S. Pres. Barack Obama in 2015.