Annie Dillard (née Doak; born April 30, 1945)[1] is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and nonfiction.
Her father taught her many useful subjects such as plumbing, economics, and the intricacies of the novel On the Road, though by the end of her adolescence she began to realize neither of her parents were infallible.
In her autobiography, Dillard describes reading a wide variety of subjects including geology, natural history, entomology, epidemiology, and poetry, among others.
When she told her minister of her decision, she was given four volumes of C. S. Lewis's broadcast talks, from which she appreciated that author's philosophy on suffering, but elsewhere found the topic inadequately addressed.
Dillard attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied English, theology, and creative writing.
"[citation needed] Dillard spent the first few years after graduation oil painting, writing, and keeping a journal.
[6] Dillard's works have been compared to those by Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and John Donne,[2] and she cites Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Graham Greene, George Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway among her favorite authors.
[8][9] In her first book of poems, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974), Dillard first articulated themes that she would later explore in other works of prose.
[10] Dillard's journals served as a source for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), a nonfiction narrative about the natural world near her home in Roanoke, Virginia.
The book describes God by studying creation, leading one critic to call her "one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th Century.
"[10] In The New York Times, Eudora Welty said the work was "admirable writing" that reveals "a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled... [an] intensity of experience that she seems to live in order to declare," but "I honestly don't know what [Dillard] is talking about at...
[12] One day, Dillard decided to begin a project in which she would write about whatever happened on Lummi Island within a three-day time period.
When a plane crashed on the second day, Dillard began to contemplate the problem of pain and God's allowance of "natural evil to happen.
The essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk: In Living by Fiction (1982), Dillard produced her "theory about why flattening of character and narrative cannot happen in literature as it did when the visual arts rejected deep space for the picture plane."
One part takes place in China, where Dillard was a member of a delegation of six American writers and publishers, following the fall of the Gang of Four.
In the second half, Dillard hosts a group of Chinese writers, whom she takes to Disneyland along with Allen Ginsberg.
"[13] The Boston Globe called it "a kind of spiritual Strunk & White, a small and brilliant guidebook to the landscape of a writer's task."
Its topics mirror the various chapters of the book and include "birth, sand, China, clouds, numbers, Israel, encounters, thinker, evil, and now."
The story begins after World War II and tells of a lifelong love between a husband and wife who live in Provincetown, Cape Cod.
[15] 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 of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut,[16] where she remained until she retired Professor Emerita in 2002.
[citation needed] The Los Angeles Times' survey of the century's 100 best Western novels includes The Living.
[2] In 1976, she married Gary Clevidence, an anthropology professor at Fairhaven College, and they have a child, Cody Rose, born in 1984.
[22] In 1988, Dillard married historical biographer Robert D. Richardson, whom she met after sending him a fan letter about his book Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.
Her first prose book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, makes references not only to Christ and the Bible, but also to Islam, and Judaism, Buddhism, and Inuit spirituality.