She also had a strong sense of social justice. "Opposition emboldened Mother, and she would take on anybody on any issue," Dillard asserts in
An American Childhood (1987), particularly in instances such as cruelty to classmates and neighbors, and Dillard and her sisters were expected to take a stand. Pam Doak also had a passion for the English language that provided her daughter with a keen sense of words.
The Doak sisters--Annie, Amy, and Molly--grew up in Pittsburgh. The family moved from house to house in the general neighborhood of Frick Park. The children spent summers at their grandparents' home on the southern shore of Lake Erie. Dillard went to the Presbyterian church and to the Ellis School in Pittsburgh. Among Dillard's childhood interests were drawing, rock and bug collecting, sledding, bicycling, and playing baseball. Above all, she was an avid reader, particularly of novels. After she got a bird book, she learned to recognize the birds she was seeing in the deep woods of the park. One was, as she writes in An American Childhood, "a downy woodpecker working a tree trunk; the woodpecker looked like a jackhammer man banging Edgerton Avenue to bits. I saw sparrows, robins, cardinals, juncos, chipmunks, squirrels."
The reference to reading indicates her sense of the importance of books.
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