'Westward I Go Free': Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Abstract

In 1974 Annie Dillard published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1975. Dillard was Presbyterian, a world view that taints her transcriptions of natural history. Both her father and her husband made contemporary horror films that shaped the aesthetics of her nominally nonfiction book. Internal evidence and secondary scholarship call into question the veracity of key aspects of the book. Some alleged observations of nature are augmented or falsified. In interviews conducted after the book was published, the author expressed an opinion that nonfiction would benefit from fictional inflections. Six weeks after the book’s having won the Pulitzer Prize was announced, the author separated from her professor-husband and moved some 2,800 miles from Roanoke, Virginia, to Bellingham, Washington. Language in the final chapters of the book foretells that move.