-

 

Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, at age 29.  Without question, a desert island book.  If there is a book I have enjoyed reading more, I cannot think of it.  Add it to your list…or read it again.

Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945) is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.

Dillard's works have been compared to those by Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and John Donne. She cites Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Ernest Hemingway as a few of her all-time favorite authors.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

 

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. Although the book contains named chapters, it is not (as some critics assumed) a collection of essays.

 Early chapters were published in The Atlantic, Harpers, and Sports Illustrated.

The book describes God by studying creation, leading one critic to call her "one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th Century."

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... times."

The book won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, when Dillard was 29.

On September 10, 2015, President Obama awarded Annie Dillard with a National Medal for the Arts and Humanities.

She is also an artist. Her website sells her paintings to benefit a charity called Partners in Health. Dr. Paul Farmer founded the charity to rid the world of infectious disease.


Lanscape watercolor of water

 

“Building Great Collections; One Fine Book at a Time.”

Check out our current offerings HERE

 

#AnnieDillard #TodayInLiteraryHistory

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
  Adler long strove to bring philosophy to the masses, and some of his works (such as How to Read a Book) became popular bestsellers. He was also an advocate of economic democracy and wrote an influential preface to Louis O. Kelso's The Capitalist Manifesto.    Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952, by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., to present the Great Books in a 54-volume set.  The original editors had three criteria for including a book in the series: the book must be relevant to contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-read; and it must be a part of "the great conversation about the great ideas", relevant to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas identified by the editors. The books were not chosen based on ethnic and cultural inclusiveness, historical influence, or the editors' agreement with the views expressed by the authors.  FOOD FOR THE
Read more
-
Image
  Aubrey Beardsley (1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death at 25 from tuberculosis. In 1892, Beardsley travelled to Paris, where he discovered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the Parisian fashion for Japanese prints, both of which would be major influences on his own style. Beardsley's first commission was Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory (1893), which he illustrated for the publishing house J. M. Dent and Company. Beardsley was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era, renowned for his dark and perverse images and grote
Read more
-
Image
  An English poet, who later became an American citizen. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. Auden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance. Epitaph on a Tyrant Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets. Above is one of Auden’s short masterpieces. In just six lines, he manages to say so much about the nature of tyranny.  He lived in Berlin in the 1930’s and published the poem in 1939. The specific tyrant Auden had in min
Read more