Poet, essayist, and novelist Annie Dillard entered the 1974 literary scene with a book of poems called Tickets for a Prayer Wheel and a Thoreauvian natural history titled Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The latter brought the twenty-eight-year-old the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. It also garnered her a coterie of readers that has grown with each of her succeeding volumes. Readers relish Dillard's minute observations of nature, her lush and lyrical prose, and her high-spirited humor that only places in higher relief her serious metaphysical quest. With each work that followed the success of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, readers waited for Dillard to assay fiction, and she did so with the 1992 novel The Living.

Dillard was born Meta Ann Doak on 30 April 1945. An American Childhood, her 1987 memoir, recounts her early life through her high-school years as the elder of two daughters of well-to-do Pittsburgh parents Frank and Pam (Lambert) Doak...