Annie Dillard, Author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dead at 81

Annie Dillard, the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, An American Childhood, and many other major works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and theory, died at the age of 81 on September 15 at her home in Massachusetts. Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson, and in the New York Times. Dillard’s work, though not exclusively about nature, often focused on the natural world, the cruelty and beauty of both flora and fauna, narrowing in on the extremity of the biological systems surrounding us.

She was an incomparable prose writer whose descriptions and philosophical musings dotted every page. Arguably her most famous book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published in 1974 when she was just 28, and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal from Barack Obama, which marked her last public appearance. The home page of her website has since read, “I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters. I’ve got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me.”

But to anyone who has read and loved her work, the desire for the space and time and quiet to read and concentrate makes perfect sense. “I am no scientist,” Dillard declared in Tinker Creek, “but a poet and a walker with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts.”