Annie Dillard

Biography

American writer, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945. She graduated from Hollins University in Virginia in 1968 with a thesis on Thoreau's Walden. After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1971 she spent a year alone beside Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which produced Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974); at twenty-nine she won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for it. She has consistently refused the label of nature writer, insisting that her subject is seeing, consciousness and theodicy rather than scenery. Other works include the poetry collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, the essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk, the memoir An American Childhood and the novel The Maytrees. She wrote for Harper's Bazaar and The Atlantic and taught for many years at Wesleyan University.