Annie Dillard is born
Poet essayist and novelist Annie Dillard is born on this day in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1945.At age 28 Dillard became the youngest American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize which she was awarded for her collection of essays Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974).The book often compared with Henry David Thoreaus Walden collected her meditations during a year spent living on the shores of a creek.She also wrote a collection of poetry Tickets for a Prayer Wheel the same year.Dillard began reading avidly as a child and studied writing at Hollins College in Roanoke Virginia where she earned her bachelors and masters degrees.
In 1965 she married her creative writing professor R.H.W.Dillard.Between 1975 and 1978 she was a scholar-in-residence at Western Washington University in Bellingham Washington.
She moved to Connecticut in 1979 and became a professor at Wesleyan University after her second marriage.She began writing prolifically publishing five more books by 1989 and writing essays poems memoirs and reviews.Dillards first novel The Living (1992) a detailed chronicle of Pacific Northwest pioneers was a critical success.Her second novel The Maytrees (2007) which follows the courtship marriage and later years of a Cape Cod couple was a finalist for the PENFaulkner Award in 2008.
