Departures of note

Annie Dillard was an American author acclaimed for her prose in both fiction and nonfiction, including poetry, essays, and literary criticism. Born in Pittsburgh in 1945, she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek at age 28, a meditative, Thoreau-like account of observing nature near her Virginia home that earned the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and established her as a leading voice in American nature writing. Her subsequent works included the essay collections Teaching a Stone to Talk and Holy the Firm, the memoir An American Childhood, and the novels The Living and The Maytrees. From 1980 she taught for more than two decades in the English department at Wesleyan University. Her writing, marked by close observation of the natural world and philosophical rumination on life, good and evil, influenced generations of readers and writers.