Review Of Annie Dillard's 'American Childhood'

Nature is a place full of mystery waiting to be discovered. The outdoors contains the sky with countless starts at night and the bright sun in the mornings. Nature is filled with crystal watered lakes and lashing waves of blue seas. The green leaves on the trees wonder in the natural world. Three authors by the name Annie Dillard, Mark Twain, and Eudora Welty write about how their interaction with nature and how it influences their character and outlook on life. “The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world. At school I saw searing sight. It turned me to books; it turned me to jelly; it turned me much later, I supposed into an early version of a runaway, scapegrace.” In source A “An American Childhood” Annie Dillard uses anaphora in the first
two paragraphs to emphasize how much she read books.
Reading as much as she did made her vocabulary extensive, which explains why she’s been such a successful writer. In “American Childhood” Annie Dillard talks about her youth life. In source A she writes about how the moth was too big for the mason jar it was kept inside of. The way she wrote about the creature and it being set free by the teacher into nature refers to her as a teen leaving high school and going off into college. She relates how the moth crawls off down Shayside where it will soon die because it will not be able to crawl much longer, to where people expect her to go off to after college. The way she ties nature and the moth into her life story was incredible. In Source D “Bibliography of Annie Dillard,” Bob Richardson wrote about how often Annie Dillard was outdoors. As a child she rode her bike all over Pittsburgh, ran flying down sidewalks with arms spread wide and broke her nose two mornings in a row sledding belly-down and headfirst and going too fast. She threw a baseball at a strike zone drawn in red on a garage door. Ball playing became a lifelong passion of Annie Dillard. She was also an avid collector of
both rocks and insects. She had a chemistry set and a microscope which she found a single-celled world full of wonders. All of Annie Dillard’s times outdoors helped her get ideas for her books she wrote. They affected her character and made her the terrific author she is today. Those times helped her place in the front rank of American literature. Because of all the memories she had in nature with herself and her family; she had many memories to write about in her books. Mark Twain was born November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. Twain passed away April 21, 1910 at age 74. He was an American writer. He had four children, Langdon, Susy, Clara, and Jean. Olivia Langdon Clemens was his wife. A lot of Twains stories have been based off of his memories in nature. For example in 1865 his humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was published, based on a story he heard at Angles Hotel in California where he had spent some time as a miner. Twain had many siblings but most of them passed away. At age 11, his father died of pneumonia. Source F talks about Mark Twain’s travels in nature; Twain joined Orion and headed west. Mark Twain and his brother traveled more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. His journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner on Comstock Lode. Twain failed as a miner and worked at a Virginia City newspaper, The Territorial Enterprise. Mark Twain’s interaction with nature influenced his outlook on life by helping him become successful. Because of the experiences outdoors, the journeys, and mining he was able to become a very successful writer whose books are still popular today.