Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Historical Context

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Historical Context

The 1960s and 1970s

The years during which Dillard lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, keeping her journals and writing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, were among the most turbulent in recent United States history. In the five years before she began writing in 1973, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; the United States withdrew from Vietnam after a long and unsuccessful military action in which tens of thousands of Americans died; the presidency of Richard Nixon had started to unravel because of the scandal known as "Watergate"; the nation was feeling the first effects of an energy crisis; an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, addressing gender equality issues, was passed by Congress but never ratified by the states.

It is striking, then—and for some critics at the time it was disturbing—that Dillard mentions none of these things in her book. Dillard's focus...
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