Bily is an instructor of writing and literature at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In this essay, she explores the role of reading in Dillard's vision of the student of nature.
The term nature writing refers to the work of those writers since the time of Thoreau and Darwin who have consciously tried to go out into nature, look at it closely, and report what they see, without sentimentalizing or anthropomorphizing, without getting in the way of the natural events they observe, and without using nature as a backdrop for a political or social commentary. It is into this genre of writing that Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is usually classified. Dillard wrote her master's thesis on Walden, and used Thoreau's book as a model for her own.
Dillard's reliance on Thoreau is interesting in.....
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