Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The eldest of her parents’ three daughters, Annie Doak grew up in a section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the post-war period. There, she attended a girls’ preparatory school and was a member of the Presbyterian church. She spent several summers of her youth away at church-sponsored summer camps. As a child, she was an avid reader, painter, and collector of natural objects such as rocks and insects. She attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied English, creative writing, and theology, and where she met and married her first husband, creative writing professor Richard Dillard. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Hollins College in 1967 and 1968, respectively, after which she embarked on her literary career with the publication of her first collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, in 1974, quickly followed by her seminal, Pulitzer-prize work of literary nonfiction, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She and Richard Dillard divorced in 1975, after which she left Virginia for a literary residency at Western Washington University in Washington state. There, she met and married her second husband, with whom she had a daughter in 1984. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Dillard wrote and published literary nonfiction, essays, two novels, and a book of experimental poetry, as well as teaching creative writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, which she won for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard received a PEN award for a collection of essays and a National Humanities Medal for her entire body of work.

Although the relationship between the narrator and nature in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is both deeply literary and intensely idiosyncratic, the book, published in 1974, is situated in a growing return-to-nature movement in the United States. This movement grew out of influential books published in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s by survivalists and homesteaders like Brandford Angier and Helen and Scott Nearing, as well as from projects such as Foxfire, a student-led publication in Georgia established in 1966 that sought to preserve Appalachian history and folkways. The book’s central pivot is a chapter recounting the floods that visited Virginia in June of 1972 with the arrival of Hurricane Agnes. The first named storm of the 1972 season, Agnes was only a Category-1 storm, but because its track carried it across a wide swath of the eastern seaboard, it was at the time the costliest hurricane on record in terms of economic damage ($2.1 billion in the United States). More than 120 people lost their lives in the flooding, which the storm brought to Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, and West Virginia. 

Annie Dillard draws heavily on the ideas and traditions of the 19th-century American Transcendentalists in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which has been frequently compared to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (published in 1854) because both books emphasize their narrators’ encounters with, observations of, and relationship to the natural world. Dillard has also named American naturalist Edwin Muir’s An Autobiography (published in 1954) as an influence on her writing style, especially in the way she attends to the ecologies and landscapes around her. Readers who enjoy the way Dillard weaves personal narrative with observations about the landscape and the intricate ecosystems of the earth will find similar ground covered (in similarly lyrical prose) in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 2013 Braiding Sweetgrass and Peter Wohlleben’s 2015 The Hidden Life of Trees (translated from German into English by Jane Billinghurst) or in the essays and poetry of Mary Oliver—namely, her essay collection Upstream (published 2016) or her poetry collection Devotions (2017). And Dillard herself takes up the questions Pilgrim at Tinker Creek raises about divine justice in later works, including 1977’s Holy the Firm and 1999’s For the Time Being.