Annie Dillard, Pulitzer-winning nature writer, dies at 81
Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and author known for her poetic meditations on nature and writing, has died at 81.
Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and essayist whose lyrical meditations on nature, faith and the craft of writing earned her a lasting place in American letters, has died. She was 81.
Her literary agent, Rob McQuilkin, said Dillard died of natural causes on Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Born Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh, Dillard was raised by nonconformist parents who encouraged her wide-ranging curiosity. In her 1987 memoir "An American Childhood," she recalled a youthful hunger for knowledge that, by age 13, had her reading about drawing, painting, rocks, criminology, birds, moths, beetles, stamps, ponds and streams, and medicine.
She was not yet 30 when "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," published in 1974, established her as a major new literary voice and a successor to Henry David Thoreau as an idiosyncratic observer of the natural world. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, grew out of private writings about the landscape around her home in Roanoke, Virginia. Dillard, who had written her master's thesis on Thoreau at Hollins College, described it as "a meteorological journal of the mind."
Over the following decades, she produced a remarkably varied body of work, from the poetry collection "Tickets for a Prayer Wheel" to what she called the "jolly journalism" of "Encounters with Chinese Writers" to the 2007 novel of marriage, "The Maytrees," a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award in 2008. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her a National Humanities Medal for her "profound reflections on human life and nature."
Dillard taught for more than 20 years at Wesleyan University before retiring in 2002. She was married three times, most recently to the literary biographer Robert Richardson, whom she met after sending him a fan letter about his biography of Thoreau. She had one child, Cody, with her second husband, Gary Clevidence. Her first marriage, to creative writing teacher Richard Dillard, ended in divorce in 1975 after 10 years.