Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard (born 1945) is an American writer best known for her work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975. Dillard attended Hollins College, a small women’s institution in Virginia. During her sophomore year, she married her creative writing professor, Richard Dillard. She graduated from Hollins in 1967 and immediately begin working on her master’s in English; Dillard wrote her thesis on Henry David Thoreau and his experiences at Walden Pond. After the publication and success of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard accepted a position at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she taught for 21 years. She wrote many successful works of poetry, essays, and prose, including Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, The Writing Life, and The Maytrees.

Dillard was inspired to write Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as she walked around her suburban neighborhood. Throughout the writing process, she struggled with various ways in which she differed from the great nature writers of history. She was keenly aware of the relationship between nature writing and the lone white male in the wilderness. As a suburban housewife, Dillard debated whether she should write a fictional book from a male perspective and whether leaving out the suburban components would be deceitful. Scholars wonder whether these concerns influenced her decision not to name the book Tinker Creek, in the style of Walden.

As a child, Dillard loved spending time outside and learning about the outdoors. She attended a Presbyterian church but soon become disenchanted. A study of C. S. Lewis, however, reignited her spiritual pursuits. As an adult, nature and religious themes permeated her writing. Dillard is a thoughtful and intentional writer. She studied the books she liked—Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and The Outermost House by Henry Beston—and tried to figure out what made them work. When writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she wrote down her observations on notecards, continuously re-sorting them to make the book work. She believed that an author’s courage is what makes a book great. Her decision to maintain her feminine voice in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reflects this courage.