Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Front Cover
Harper Collins, Oct 13, 2009 - Nature - 304 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about her book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, where Annie Dillard set out to chronicle incidents of "beauty tangled in a rapture with violence."

Dillard's personal narrative highlights one year's exploration on foot in the Virginia region through which Tinker Creek runs. In the summer, she stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall, she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays King of the Meadow with a field of grasshoppers. The result is an exhilarating tale of nature and its seasons.

 

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
16
Section 3
37
Section 4
55
Section 5
73
Section 6
78
Section 7
105
Section 8
124
Section 10
161
Section 11
184
Section 12
209
Section 13
225
Section 14
265
Section 15
278
Section 16
283
Section 17
285

Section 9
149

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About the author (2009)

Annie Dillard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, The Living and The Maytrees. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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