Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard (1945-      )

Bio:

• Born Meta Ann Doak and had two sisters.
• Was an avid reader from a young age, later became a rebellious child rejecting church and the school rules that prohibited her from smoking.
• Went to Hollins University (http://www.hollins.edu) and married one of her writing professors, Richard Dillard, at the end of her sophomore year. She went on to complete her bachelors and masters degrees at Hollins.
• Nearly died of pneumonia in 1971.
• After winning the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard’s marriage ended and she moved to an isolated cabin on Puget Sound.
• She later worked at Western Washington University and married Gary Clevidence.
• When she was writing, she would work up to 15 or 16 hours a day.
• In 1979 she and Clevidence moved to Connecticut where they married in 1980. They had one daughter and together with his other two daughters the family summered on Cape Cod.
• Dillard divorced and remarried to yet another scholar, Robert D. Richardson Jr.
• She is an adjunct professor and writer in residence at Wesleyan University.

Works:

• Works mostly in narrative nonfiction, but has also written a memoir, poetry and a novel.
• Was most influenced by Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
• Combines a new attention to science and ecology to the Romantics and Transcendentalists.
• She also loves baseball and uses baseball metaphors in some of her work.

Quotations from the author:

• Dillard's parents and Marian Hamilton, the headmistress of Ellis School for girls, wanted her to attend college in the South to, as she records in her book An American Childhood, "smooth off my rough edges." Dillard's response was characteristic of the nonconformity and intellectual playfulness she inherited from her parents: "I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?"
• Dillard, as quoted in Grace Suh's essay "Ideas Are Tough; Irony Is Easy" (4 October 1996), advises aspiring writers that by the time they are five years old they have enough experience, but what they need is the library: "What you have to learn is the best of what is being thought and said. If you had a choice between spending a summer in Nepal and spending a summer in the library, go to the library."(Warner)