Annie Dillard The Pulitzer-Winning Author Of 'Pilgrim At Tinker Creek' Has Died At 81
Annie Dillard died Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts at the age of 81. Her literary agent Rob McQuilkin confirmed she died of natural causes. She had largely withdrawn from public life in recent years.
Dillard won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her 1974 account of a year spent observing the natural world around Virginia's Tinker Creek, written with the precision of a scientist and the attentiveness of a mystic.
The book drew immediate comparisons to Thoreau's Walden and established her as one of the most important American writers of her generation. When a reporter called to tell her she had won the Pulitzer and asked what she was doing at that moment, she said she was washing spinach. "They said, 'Don't you know that this means you need never wash spinach again?' And I thought, and probably said, 'Sure, I do. I don't like sand in my spinach.'"
Her other works include An American Childhood, The Writing Life, barely 100 pages and required reading in MFA programs for decades, The Living, The Maytrees and the 2016 essay collection The Abundance.
Her work was shaped throughout by the tension between fertility and destruction in the natural world, and by her belief that writing itself was a destructive act. "Once you write about something, you've destroyed it," she said. "You no longer have the memory. You only have the memory of what you've written."
She was 81. The memory of what she wrote will last considerably longer.
