It’s the birthday of Annie Dillard, best known for her stunning Pulitzer-winning nonfiction narrative on the natural world, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). Pilgrim and two of her later books, Holy the Firm (1977) and For the Time Being (1999), form a trilogy of narratives that ask why natural evil exists. Her husband Robert Richardson writes, “Dillard’s literary role has been, and continues to be, one of dragging her readers to wakefulness.”

Dillard was born in Pittsburgh in 1945, the oldest of three sisters. Her mother had a “wild transgressive genius for practical joking.” (This is from Richardson’s bio of Dillard posted at her official website.) “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 Cecile.’” Dillard’s childhood was stuffed with myriad interests lived out to the full: baseball (a lifelong passion), rock collecting, insect collecting, drawing and painting, bike riding, sledding (she broke her nose two mornings in a row while sledding), boys, and more than anything else, reading.

Dillard attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, married her writing teacher Richard Dillard when she was 20, and earned her M.A. in English in 1968. Her first book, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, was a collection of poems and came out in 1974, but Pilgrim was published just two months later. After winning the Pulitzer, and partly to avoid the publicity, Dillard moved to an island off Puget Sound. While there she taught part time at Western Washington State University, met her second husband Gary Clevidence, and wrote Holy the Firm, her favorite book. She also wrote the short story “The Living,” later expanded into a novel. In 1979 she and Clevidence moved to Middletown, Connecticut, where Dillard became Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University and where their daughter was born a few years later. Dillard’s book of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk, came out in 1982, her memoir An American Childhood in 1987. In 1988 Dillard divorced Clevidence and married Richardson, a biographer of Thoreau and Emerson.

Check out Richardson’s bio of Dillard at her website—it’s hard to get to from the rest of the website so here’s the link. Then cruise to the pages on Dillard’s books and essays, where she occasionally disses her own work, e.g. saying of one essay, “This is emphatically not interesting; I renounce it.” She has won an insane number of awards and accolades and may well go down in history as one of the greatest American writers.

Have a Monday devoid of evil, natural or otherwise, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.