The Annie Dillard Reader

The Annie Dillard Reader is a selection by the author from some of her work. There are many chapters from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood. Holy the Firm appears in its entirety, and revised. Also included is a new version of a short story first published in 1978 in Harper’s, called “The Living.” The characters of the original story became the nucleus of the 1992 novel The Living. Finally there are a few poems, old and new, one uncollected essay, and some narratives from her sole book of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1975. She is the author of eleven other books, including the memoir An American Childhood, the novel The Living, and a volume of found poems Mornings Like This. She has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Dillard attended Hollins College in Virginia. After living for five years in the Pacific Northwest, she returned to the East Coast, where she lives with her husband Robert D. Richardson Jr. and daughter Rosy.