Annie Dillard

American · born 1945

Annie Dillard was born Meta Ann Doak on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three daughters in a household she later called full of comedians. She studied English, theology and creative writing at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, taking a master's degree in 1968 with a thesis on Henry David Thoreau, and it was near the college, along a stream called Tinker Creek, that she began keeping the detailed nature journals that would become her breakthrough book. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974 when she was twenty-nine, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction the following year, making her the youngest woman ever to receive it. She had married the poet and professor Richard Dillard in 1965, taking the surname under which she still publishes, though the marriage ended a decade later. Dillard went on to write across nearly every form: the meditative Holy the Firm, the memoir An American Childhood, the craft book The Writing Life, and two novels, The Living and The Maytrees, alongside essay collections including Teaching a Stone to Talk and The Abundance. From 1980 to 2002 she taught writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, retiring as professor emerita. She married the historian and biographer Robert D. Richardson in 1988, after writing to him as a fan of his work on Thoreau; they remained together until his death in 2020. In 2015 she received the National Humanities Medal for a body of work that returns again and again to the discipline of paying close attention, to the natural world, to language, and to whatever it is that looks back.