Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard , b. Meta Annie Doak (born October 30, 1945 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) is an American poet , essayist and university professor who received the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek .

biography

Annie Doak, who came from a wealthy family, developed a great love for nature at an early age , which was encouraged by her parents. Her father also taught in extracurricular subjects such as economics , plumbing and let her works of the Beat Generation as the way of Jack Kerouac read. She later rebelled at times against the upbringing, which was shaped by the Presbyterian Church , until a clergyman introduced her to the theological work of CS Lewis . As a teenager , she was interested in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and began writing her first poems . Later she dealt with spiritual customs and included views of Buddhism , Judaism , Sufism and Christianity , but also customs of the Inuit culture .

After attending school, she studied English at Hollins College in Roanoke (Virginia) and graduated in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA English). At Hollins College she also met her first husband, university professor RHW Dillard, ten years her senior, and married him in the sophomore year. She completed a subsequent postgraduate study there in 1968 with a Master of Arts (MA English) with a thesis on the book Walden by the writer Henry David Thoreau , in which the latter described his simple life at the lake and in nature, but also covered topics how economy and society integrated.

Similar to Thoreau in Walden , she herself undertook her own "exodus" into nature in 1971 after she had almost died of pneumonia . After her health improved, she then lived for almost a year in the middle of the forest landscape of Tinker Creek. She wrote a journal in which she described her views and observations of nature, spirituality and religion. She started writing 16 hours a day, lived on coffee and Coca-Cola, and some days did not sleep. During the stay, she lost 15 kilograms and the plants in the house also died. The journal of her stay, published in 1974 under the title Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in the form of essays , was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1975 .

Also in 1974 she published her first anthology with Tickets for a Prayer Wheel . After that, she from 1975 to 1978 as resident scholars ( Scholar ) at the Western Washington University (WWU) worked before to 1981, the offer of a 1979 professor at Wesleyan University accepted.

Dillard, whose style is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson , Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was also known for her ecotheological or eco-spiritual essays such as Holy the Firm (1977), Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982) and For the Time Being (1999). After Living by Fiction (1982), a book on literary criticism , and the travelogue Encounters with Chinese Writers (1984), she wrote her memoir An American Childhood (1987) in 1987 . This was followed by The Writing Life (1989), in which she described the “manual” work of a writer before she wrote a novel with The Living (1992) , which dealt with the history of the Indians of North America and the first settlers in Washington state and with the Works by Willa Cather , but also by James Joyce has been compared.

After the collection The Annie Dillard Reader (1994), Mornings Like This: Found Poems (1995) was another volume of poetry. She has also written articles for newspapers and magazines such as Harper's Magazine , The Atlantic Monthly , The Christian Science Monitor and Cosmopolitan .

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, she has received numerous other prizes such as the New York Press Club Award , the Governor's Prize for Literature , the Connecticut Governor's Art Prize (1993) and the History Makers Award from the Western Pennsylvania Historical Society (1993). She was also awarded honorary doctorates from Connecticut College , Boston College and the University of Hartford .

Annie Dillard was also politically active and supported the Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

In 2007, The Maytrees , another Provincetown set , was published.

Dillard's works were also the German translated , including by Henning Ahrens . In 1996, Klett-Cotta in Stuttgart published the German translation by Karen Nölle-Fischer of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek under the title Der Free Fall der Mockingbird . In 2016, the German translation by Karen Nölle of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published by Matthes & Seitz in Berlin .

In 1999 Dillard was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2013 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . For 2014 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal .

Background literature

Linda L. Smith: Annie Dillard , New York, Twayne, 1991
Sandra Humble Johnson: The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard , Kent State University Press, 1992
Scott Slovic: Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey , Wendell Berry , Barry Lopez , Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1992
James I. McClintock: Nature's Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold , Joseph Wood Krutch , Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder , Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1994
Nancy C. Parrish: Lee Smith , Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers , Louisiana State University Press, 1999
Philip Harnden: Journeys of Simplicity: Traveling Light with Thomas Merton , Bashō , Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Others , Skylight Paths Publishing, 2003

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

↑ The Annie Dillard Log
↑ Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 13, 2019 .

personal data
SURNAME	Dillard, Annie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Meta Annie Doak (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American writer and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH	October 30, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH	Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania

[1] The Annie Dillard Log

[2] Academy Members. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed January 13, 2019 .