Annie Dillard Totally Explained

Everything about Annie Dillard totally explained

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, best known for her narrative nonfiction. She has also published poetry, essays, literary criticism, autobiography, and fiction. She is married to the historical biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

Life and Career

Dillard describes her childhood at length in An American Childhood. She is the oldest of three daughters, born to affluent parents who raised her in an environment that encouraged humor, creativity, and exploration. Her mother was a non-conformist and incredibly energetic. Her father taught her everything from plumbing to economics to the intricacies of the novel On The Road. Dillard's childhood was filled with days of piano and dance classes, rock and bug collecting, and devouring the books on the shelves of the public library. But there were also many troubles--like the horrors of war, which she often read about.
   After graduating from high school, Dillard attended Hollins College (Hollins University since 1998), in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, the poet R. H. W. Dillard (her maiden name is Doak)--the person she says "taught her everything she knows" about writing. In 1968 she graduated with a Masters in English, after writing a 40-page thesis on Thoreau's Walden, which focused on the use of Walden Pond as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth." The next couple of years after graduation Dillard spent painting and writing. During this time, she published several poems and short stories.
   Dillard's family didn't attend Presbyterian church but when she was a child she and her sister did. She also spent a few summers at a fundamentalist summer camp. During her rebellious teenage years, she quit church because of the "hypocrisy." When she told her minister, he gave her a stack of books by C. S. Lewis, which ended this rebellion. After her college years, Dillard became, as she says, "spiritually promiscuous," incorporating the ideas of many religious systems into her own religious understanding. Not only are there references to Christ and the Bible in her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but also to Judaism, Buddhism, Sufism, and even Eskimo spirituality. In the 1990s, Dillard converted to Roman Catholicism.
   After a near-fatal bout of pneumonia in 1971, Dillard decided that she needed to experience life more fully and began work on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She spent four seasons living near Tinker Creek, a suburban area surrounded by forests, creeks, mountains, and myriad animal life. When she wasn't in the library, she spent her time outdoors, walking and camping. After living there for about a year, Dillard began to write about her experiences near the creek. She started by transposing notes from her twenty-plus-volume reading journal. It took her eight months to turn the notecards into the book. Towards the end of the eight months, she was so absorbed that she sometimes wrote for fifteen hours a day, cut off from society without interest in current events (like the Watergate scandal). The finished book brought her a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 at the age of twenty-nine. Her other books in this vein include Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and For the Time Being. She has also written a memoir about growing up in Pittsburgh, An American Childhood, and two novels, The Living, and 2007's The Maytrees. Dillard spent some time as a faculty member in the English department at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

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

Quotations

We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through; no one gets out. For the Time Being, pg. 187
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we're almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we've forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it's a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add –until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form people can use. 'Total Eclipse' in 'Teaching a Stone to Talk', pg. 99

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