Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

Annie Dillard has been considered a major voice in American literature since she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Her reputation has increased steadily if bumpily since then. Scholars and critics have recognized her scope’s widening from the natural world to history, metaphysics, ever --more narratives, and theology until Paul Roberts could say in the Toronto Globe and Mail that the 1999 publication of For the Time Being, “places Dillard more firmly than ever among the very greatest of American writers.”

Dillard has written a novel, some essays, poetry, and a memoir; her most characteristic books, however, are imaginative non-fiction narratives-—witnessings or accounts, stories and speculations–- that resist classification. Her distinctive, and distinctively American, prose style has been widely recognized and openly imitated. She is, like Thoreau, a close observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocket- maker; her works’ prose structures and aims, however, are all her own. “We have less time than we knew,” she writes in Holy the Firm, “and that time buoyant, cloven, lucent, missile, and wild.”
Her father, Frank Doak, worked for some years as a minor corporate executive, but his passions were for Dixieland jazz, for taking his boat down the Mississippi, for dancing, and above all for telling jokes. Frank Doak self-published a memoir, Something Like a Hoagie, in 1994. Dillard has written –in An American Childhood-- about him and about her spirited mother, Pam (Lambert) Doak, who loved dancing and had a sort of wild transgressive genius for practical joking. If the phone rang and it was a wrong number, Dillard’s mother would hand it to the nearest person; “Here, take this, your name is