The Author

Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of novels, essays, short stories, and memoirs. She portrays herself throughout this book not as a writer who has achieved considerable success but as a writer who struggles to achieve truth in her work. It's important to note here that she doesn't suggest that that truth necessarily has to relate to the world or to life, but it must be the work's own truth, the destination of the line of words as defined by the journey to get there. She also portrays herself as having an almost ritualistic set of habits and/or belief systems that she must enact in order to write, almost torturous patterns of simultaneous avoidance and preparation that, at times, seem almost comic in their specificity - half a cup too much of coffee, apparently, is enough to ruin her whole writing day.

Finally, she comes...