Annie Dillard, who as a young American writer walked into the woods and came out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the wonders and horrors of creation, the modern classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” died on Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Mass. She was 81.
Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson.
With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Ms. Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a best-selling autobiography and another best seller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them.
Reviewers of “Tinker Creek” were quick to understand it as a 20th-century analogue to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” This was no coincidence: Ms. Dillard had chosen Thoreau as the subject of her master’s thesis at Hollins University, the women’s liberal arts college in Roanoke, Va.
Like Thoreau, she found an unremarkable body of water to be as good a place as any for deep thoughts — particularly about how to reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with nature’s cruelty.
Unlike Thoreau, Ms. Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper. After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins.
That she was a photogenic young woman coming to grips with raw nature — a business that had been almost exclusively the province of men with beards — was undeniably part of the Dillard mystique. So was her insistence that, in spite of her patient, unflinching observations on flora and fauna, she wasn’t a nature writer, but rather a theologian looking high and low for God.
Among the many things she saw at Tinker Creek was a little green frog, half out of the water, “deflating like a football” before her eyes. It was in the clutches of a giant water bug whose bite had liquefied the frog’s innards. Such encounters could cause “nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans,” she wrote.
“But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure,” she added. “I walk out; I see something, some event that otherwise would have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.”
“Tinker Creek” won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1975, and Ms. Dillard was overwhelmed by requests for speeches, interviews and television appearances. Her looks were thought by many media outlets to be as newsworthy as her writing — so much so that she was ridiculed in some circles as “Cheesecake at Tinker Creek.”
Repelled by the consequences of her success, she moved to Washington State and began dividing her time between the city of Bellingham and the islands Waldron and Lummi. Her marriage to Mr. Dillard had ended in amicable divorce, and in the Pacific Northwest, she found privacy enough to regain the concentration essential to her work.
“The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water,” she wrote. “There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea.”
She added: “If the Greeks had looked at Mt. Baker all day, their large and honest art would have broken, and they would have gone fishing, as these people do.”
The Problem of Evil
Those lines are from the first fruit of her relocation, “Holy the Firm,” published in 1977, a three-part metaphysical tour de force in 76 pages honed almost to the shape and intensity of a poem. It took 14 months of full-time work, by her account, in a one-room house as “plain as a skull,” her only companions a cat and a spider.
“Nothing is going to happen in this book,” she writes. “There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time.”
But by that point, she has already told an excruciating account of a moth that gets stuck in the molten wax of a candle and itself becomes a wick that burns for two hours. Just ahead is the story of a 7-year-old girl she calls Julie Norwich, who gets safely to ground after her father’s light plane clips a line of fir trees on takeoff, only to have her face burned off by a splurt of hot fuel.
Which brings Ms. Dillard once more head-to-head with a question known to religious thinkers as the problem of evil: Could it possibly be that a loving, all-powerful God allows bad things to happen just to make goodness stand out in sharper relief?
Ms. Dillard’s years in Washington inspired some of the essays in her celebrated collection “Teaching a Stone to Talk” (1982).
Its jewel was “Total Eclipse,” which in 2000 was included in “The Best American Essays of the Century,” not long after “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” appeared on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books.
On the morning of Feb. 26, 1979, Ms. Dillard and her second husband, the anthropologist Gary Clevidence, sat atop a 500-foot-tall hill in the orchard country of the Yakima Valley to view an eclipse. They put on welder’s goggles. When the show began, Ms. Dillard experienced something like a psychedelic trip, minus the acid. The light was all wrong. The grass was platinum. Her hands were silver.
“The hillside,” she wrote, “was a nineteenth-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded.”
The first of Ms. Dillard’s two novels grew out of her Washington sojourn as well: Published in 1992, “The Living,” a 19th-century pioneer saga, centered on what became Whatcom County.
All the while, she had been teaching classes at Western Washington State College (now Western Washington University). In an account written by Paul Lindholdt, a former student working on a critical biography of Ms. Dillard, she came across as a chain-smoking force of nature: “She was by turns disorganized and inspiring, prickly and brilliant. She required her students to foot-stomp aloud the meter of favorite poems, including ‘God’s Grandeur’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
Though she had once said that she might remain in the Northwest, she and Mr. Clevidence moved east in 1979, and from then until 2001 she taught at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.
Pittsburgh-Born
Annie Dillard was born Meta Ann Doak on Sept. 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh. Her father, Frank Doak, was an executive with the American Standard corporation and a great-grandson of the founder; her mother, Pam Lambert Doak, was known as a platinum-haired wit with a taste for modernist furniture and a passion for liberal causes.
In “An American Childhood” (1987), an autobiography, Ms. Dillard recalls her young self as a serious reader, an explorer who was allowed to roam freely as soon as she could recite her phone number, and a roughneck who played football with the boys.
“You got to throw yourself mightily at someone’s running legs — either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat on your chin, with your arms empty before you,” she wrote. “It was all or nothing.”
As a teenager, she later wrote, “I would give my heart to one oddball boy after another — to older boys, to prep-school boys no one knew, to him who refused to go to college, to him who was a hood, and all of them wonderfully skinny.”
She was suspended from school for smoking. She unfairly blamed her parents for everything that was wrong with North America. And when it came time for college, she went to Hollins on the recommendation of her high school principal, who thought the place might smooth her “rough edges.” She went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, in 1967 and ’68.
Ms. Dillard and Mr. Clevidence had a child, Cody Rose, in 1984. They divorced in 1988, and Ms. Dillard married Robert D. Richardson Jr., whom she met after sending him a fan letter about his book “Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.”
A complete list of Ms. Dillard’s survivors was not immediately available.
Ms. Dillard’s first book was a collection of poems, “Tickets for a Prayer Wheel,” published a few months before “Tinker Creek.” Her later books included the journalistic “Encounters with Chinese Writers” (1984); “The Writing Life” (1989), which offered, instead of tips, reflections that amounted to “a spiritual Funk and Wagnalls,” in the words of one reviewer; “For the Time Being” (1999), which included a series of essays exploring what it means to be human; and her second novel, “The Maytrees” (2007), an uncharacteristically warm story of love set in postwar Provincetown, Mass., at the tip of Cape Cod. It was the last book she wrote.
Ms. Dillard’s papers are held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, where Diana Saverin, a researcher and Dillard fan, went through them and reported on her findings for The Atlantic in 2015. Of particular interest were the journals in which Ms. Dillard talked herself through the fear that no one would read a book like “Tinker Creek” because it was written by a woman.
“It’s impossible to imagine another situation where you can’t write a book ’cause you weren’t born with a penis,” Ms. Dillard wrote. “Except maybe ‘My Life With My Penis.’”
And Then Silence
Ms. Dillard was not immune to criticism. She took heat for fictionalizing part of “Tinker Creek,” which was billed as nonfiction — specifically the opening scene, about a fighting tomcat that smeared blood on her. It turned out to be a story she had borrowed with permission from a graduate student.
More generally, some readers who admired her bravery and virtuosity faulted her for leaving out what Thoreau had included: a sense of connection to the world most people live in. No news of the Vietnam War, Watergate or the energy crisis ever reached Tinker Creek. Writing about the book in The New York Times, Eudora Welty — herself a Pulitzer winner for her novel “The Optimist’s Daughter” — observed that Ms. Dillard was “the only person in her book, substantially the only one in her world.”
Ms. Welty added, “Speaking of the universe very often, she is yet self-surrounded, and, beyond that, book-surrounded.”
Forty-two years later, in a sweeping appraisal of her work, the author and critic William Deresiewicz noted in The Atlantic that “Dillard, like Thoreau, is never shy about pronouncing wholesale condemnation on the way her fellows live.” He thought that the alternative she represented smacked of spiritual snobbery and hypocrisy — a mystical way of life for the few who could afford it; like, for instance, the daughter of a wealthy family who became a success before she turned 30.
Mr. Deresiewicz’s article was occasioned by publication of “The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New” (2016), in which the only “new” thing was 11 years old. Ms. Dillard had, by then, been silent for nine years, since “The Maytrees.”
She was last photographed in public in 2014, when she went to the White House to receive the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama for her “profound reflections on human life and nature.”
Her website told readers, “I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books.” It stated her religion as “none” — she had been a Protestant and then a Roman Catholic and then neither — but acknowledged her connection to Christianity and Hasidism. She spent recent years at her Cape Cod home, painting watercolors.
She had written with all her might, and had tried to light the same fire in others. Amid the pyrotechnics of “Holy the Firm,” she told the following story of a day in her classroom.
“How many of you, I asked the people in my class, which of you want to give your lives and be writers?” she wrote. “I was trembling from coffee, or cigarettes, or the closeness of faces all around me … All hands rose to the question. (You, Nick? Will you? You, Margaret? Randy? Why do I want them to mean it?)”
She added: “And then I tried to tell them what the choice must mean: You can’t be anything else. You must go at your life with a broadax.”
Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.
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