“The dying pray at the last not ‘please,’ but ‘thank you,’ as a guest thanks his host at the door.” John B. Breslin, S.J., quoted this line from Annie Dillard in his 1974 America double review of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Tickets for a Prayer Wheel. It is an apt phrase with which to remember a scribe whose appreciation for the beauty of life shone through her writings on nature, spirituality and existence and led to comparisons to Henry David Thoreau. 

Dillard, who died on Sept. 15 at her home in South Wellfleet, Mass., at the age of 81, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975 for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book came out when she was just 28 years old, making her the youngest woman ever to win the Pulitzer in that category. She followed it with many more forays into poetry, essays, fiction, memoir and more over the years, including Holy The Firm (1977), Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), An American Childhood (1987), The Writing Life (1989), For the Time Being (1999), The Maytrees (2007) and The Abundance (2016). 

Dillard was born Meta Ann Doak (why does that sound like something Elon Musk would name his kid?) in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pa., in what she later described in her memoir An American Childhood as “a house full of comedians.” By the time she was a teenager, she wrote, she had her nose buried in “books on drawing, painting, rocks, criminology, birds, moths, beetles, stamps, ponds and streams, medicine.”

Dillard studied English and theology at Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Virginia, graduating in 1967 and earning her master’s degree a year later. She also met her first husband, Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor at Hollins whom she married at the end of her sophomore year. Her master’s thesis was on a writer mentioned above: Henry David Thoreau. 

Dillard published a few short stories and poems in the years after Hollins, living in the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which became the geographic locus for her first two books. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the ensuing Pulitzer made her all but a household name for nature writing (which was, Daniel Lewis wrote after her death, “a business that had been almost exclusively the province of men with beards”). After her divorce in 1975, she escaped the limelight by moving to Bellingham, Wash., where she taught for three years at Western Washington University.

Northwest Washington’s natural beauty played an important role in Dillard’s next several books, including the essay collection Teaching a Stone to Talk. “Fascinated by silence, in love with words, Annie Dillard is one of our best explorers of the narrow track that divides the solitary mountain from the lonely chasm. Whether she is recounting her falls or her ascents, she manages to be frank without appearing confessional, perhaps because the kind of revelation that interests her has nothing to do with gossip,” wrote Father Breslin in a 1982 review for America. “Reading Dillard’s prose is to be in touch with a quick and generous mind—a pleasure rare enough to be savored in what is too often a dull and mean-spirited age.”

In 1979, Dillard moved with her second husband to Connecticut, where she taught until 2001 at Wesleyan University in Middletown. After the publication in 2007 of her second novel, The Maytrees (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award in 2008), she withdrew in large part from the public eye. In 2014, President Barack Obama honored her with the National Humanities Medal for her “profound reflections on human life and nature.”

Dillard, who grew up nominally Presbyterian, became Catholic in the late 1980s, telling Mary Cantwell of The New York Times in 1992:

What I like about the Catholics is that they have this sort of mussed-up human way. You go to the Episcopal church, and people are pretty much all alike. You go to a Catholic church, and there are people of all different colors and ages, and babies squalling. You’re taking a stand with these people. You’re saying: “Here I am. One of the people who love God.” They’re really universal, really catholic. I don’t see the church as a series of political rules. I see it as a body of believers.

In 1994, America honored Dillard with its Campion Award. Named for St. Edmund Campion, S.J., the award was given annually from 1955 to 2001 to “a noted Christian person” for “eminent and long-standing service in the cause of letters.” In a column announcing Dillard’s selection, America associate editor James Torrens, S.J., praised her writing as “often poetic, pursuing knowledge through metaphor and analogy, yet compact and far from florid.” The editors, he wrote, wanted to honor her not just “for her craft but also for her religious commitment. Her home life did not foster a sense of God, yet we find it active already in her early classic, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.”

Father Torrens finished his reflection thus:

“I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready at hand,” she says. Despite her aversion to “the dread hootenanny” and her impulse to burst out laughing at church or wonder how God bears it, she is now at home in Catholic liturgy and life. 

In 1999, Dillard wrote in For the Time Being that while she remained spiritually close to Christianity and remained a devotee of the Jesuit priest, philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, she had drifted away from organized religion. (Some of her musings on Teilhard from that book were excerpted in The Paris Review in 1998).

In its obituary for Dillard, The New York Times noted “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.”

In her own 1982 collection of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Dillard had her own advice (or warning?) for Christians, one that made the rounds on social media after her death:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. 

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “In Times That Trouble,” by Mary Cecelia Bowman. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.