For a time, she even stopped attending the Presbyterian Church she had belonged to since childhood, but she soon felt the loss and returned. Like many teenagers, she took up smoking and driving fast, and wrote angry poetry about the hypocrisy and emotional impoverishment of the adults around her. Dillard has recounted her early years in an autobiography, An American Childhood (1987).ĭillard's high school years were turbulent. But she had a keen interest in the natural world even as a girl, and assembled collections of rocks, bugs, and other elements of nature, as well as a collection of favorite poems. She took piano and dance lessons, socialized at the country club, and attended the Ellis School, a private school for girls where she studied Latin, French, and German. 'Annie' was encouraged from the beginning to think and act independently, to tell stories, and to read books. She and her two younger sisters were raised under the influences of their free-thinking parents, their wealthy paternal grandparents who lived nearby, and an African-American domestic servant. Meta Ann Doak was born into an upper-middle-class family on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is beautiful and poetic, and insistently celebratory. Therefore, she is as likely to reflect on a frog being sucked dry by an insect as on the slant of light that strikes a certain springtime tree. The narrator is determined to present the natural world as it truly is, not sentimentally or selectively. As she observes the changing of the seasons and the corresponding behaviors of the plants and animals around her, she reflects on the nature of the world and of the God who set it in motion. Over the course of a year, she walks alone through the land surrounding Tinker Creek, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia. The book is a series of internal monologues and reflections spoken by an unnamed narrator. Perhaps it is because the book succeeds on so many levels that it has been so widely read and admired.

The book is frequently described as a collection of essays, but Dillard insists that the work is an integrated whole. Annie Dillard, the author, resists these labels, preferring to think of the book as a theological treatise. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, it is often read as an example of American nature writing or as a meditation. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974, is a nonfiction work that defies categorization.

Pilgrim at tinker creek book