Annie Dillard's Roanoke — Tinker Creek and the Pulitzer

A 29-year-old woman kept 20 volumes of journals, recording her walks along a creek in the Blue Ridge, then locked herself in a library carrel overlooking a tar-and-gravel roof and wrote 15 hours a day until she had a book. Annie Dillard's *Pilgrim at Tinker Creek* won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The book sold 37,000 copies in two months and has been anthologized in over thirty collections since. Dillard wrote the book in Roanoke County after earning both bachelor's and master's degrees at Hollins College—her master's thesis studied Thoreau's *Walden*, and *Pilgrim* became the spiritual heir to that work. Critics compare her to Emerson and the transcendentalists, though she resists the label of nature writer. The book records a year of observations along Tinker Creek: a frog drained by a giant water bug, muskrats stalked in summer, a cedar tree charged with flame when the light hits it. The narrator seeks the sacred by stalking or seeing, exhausting herself in the act of attention. The book defends theodicy—God's goodness in the face of a natural world that drains frogs and drowns pilgrims. "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me," the narrator writes. She names her goldfish Ellery Channing after one of Thoreau's closest friends. She writes, "I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia's Blue Ridge," and calls her house an anchor-hold, clamped to the side of the creek, facing the stream of light pouring down. Tinker Creek still runs through the valley. Hollins University, where Dillard studied, is 10 minutes from the creek.