"I can imagine literary history, down the road, naming her the chief of a movement called Neo-Transcendentalism."
New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviewed one of her works, and termed it a pleasurable read, but not just because of the tough questions Dillard posed. "What you experience is not purely mental but sensuous as well," Lehmann-Haupt remarked about
For the Time Being, a 1999 book that he concluded "may not promise the immanence of a benevolent God at the end of this brutal 20th century, [but] does offer the pleasure of Ms. Dillard's poetry, and maybe just a flicker of hope in her finally optimistic moral vision."
Dillard was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three daughters of a well-to-do family. Her father worked as a personnel manager at a division of American Standard, the plumbing-fixture company founded by his Kentucky family generations before. Dillard wrote extensively about her youth in her 1987 autobiography, An American Childhood--recalling, for example, her father leaving for work in the mornings, along with the neighborhood heads of household in the era of stay-at-home moms in middle-class America. "Oh, the great humming silence of the empty neighborhood in those days. .
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