Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, dies at 81

Writer Annie Dillard has died at 81. She wrote books characterized by spare prose and a deep connection to nature, including 1974's Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She died Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Mass.

Annie Dillard's work was shaped by a central duality: the tension between fertility and destruction in the natural world. She saw that tension everywhere, even in the act of writing itself. Speaking to NPR's Weekend Edition in 2016, she said, "Once you write about something, you've destroyed it. You no longer have the memory. You only have the memory of what you've written."

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Perhaps because of her awareness of that destructive power, Dillard was always determined to pare away everything extraneous in her work. One of her best-known titles, The Writing Life, was only a little over 100 pages long. She didn't write about the simple life. She wrote about how complex life becomes once you eliminate distractions and pay attention to what's left. While working on her first novel, The Living, about settlers in the Pacific Northwest, she lived for a time on Puget Sound without electricity or running water.

"I thought this would be terribly difficult, but in fact you spend much less time on the 'fussing' in life than you do when you have those things," she told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1992.

She had already learned to live simply while writing her best-known book, the naturalist classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In it, she tells of a year she spent in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, observing the lives and deaths of the creatures there. Reviewing it for The New York Times, Eudora Welty wrote, "As the episodes begin, we can imagine an appealing young woman standing alert in a meadow, dressed in shirt and pants, holding her field glasses and provided with a sandwich: she is waiting to see, being very patient and still. By the chapter's end, we realize or suspect we are watching a dervish dancing."

Pilgrim was a huge success, drawing comparisons with Thoreau's Walden. When it won the Pulitzer, Dillard had to ward off even more of the "fussing" she hated.

"The press called me ... and said, 'What are you doing right now as you hear that you have won the Pulitzer Prize?' " she recalled on Fresh Air. "And I said, 'I'm washing spinach.' And they said, 'Don't you know that this means you need never wash spinach again?' And I thought, and probably said, 'Sure, I do. I don't like sand in my spinach.' And I've been washing spinach ever since. And I think about it ever since. Did they think I was going to go hire a maid? I love to cook."

Dillard played baseball for years — she said she'd been told she had "a boy's arm." She gave it up in her 50s, when she discovered that her new potbelly kept her from snatching up ground balls as effectively. Later in life, though she wrote less (for publication, at least) she channeled her creativity into painting.

Dillard taught generations of would-be writers the importance of trimming away excess, and yet she didn't see writing as a miserly practice. She saw it as a chance to think and feel lavishly.

She called her 2016 essay collection The Abundance, after a passage from the Quran that she'd copied down in her journal. "They will question thee concerning what they should expend. Say, 'the abundance,' " she read on NPR's Weekend Edition in 2016. "That's what writing's about. Don't save something good for a later place. Don't hold back from your students, from the poor. ... If you spend it, it will fill up — from behind, as it were, like a well. Empty it. You'll be OK."

She kept on emptying her own cup, with 12 books of fiction, prose and poetry. In the 1987 memoir An American Childhood, she described how the social tensions of the time lurked under a veil of ordinary life. In the 2007 novel The Maytrees, she wrote of decades of love and friendship shared by an artistic couple on Cape Cod. Mornings Like This, from 1995, combined phrases found in old books into new poems. "A good trick should look hard and be easy," she wrote about the project. "These poems were a bad trick. They look easy and were really hard." 1989's The Writing Life remains a much-used text in writing programs everywhere, and yet she described it as "embarrassing."

Dillard won many awards — including the National Humanities Medal in 2014 — and became one of the best-known literary writers in the country. She saw multiple books hit The New York Times Best Sellers list, even two nonfiction works. She awed and inspired readers and fellow writers for decades. And for decades, she cleaned her own spinach.

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