Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
    A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
    A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"
    Ebook38 pages39 minutes

    A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

    By Gale and Cengage

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535830928
    A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Silent All These Years: On Annie Dillard

      Jul 29, 2021

      The way we talk about Annie Dillard makes me sad and afraid. Sad because we're unable to appreciate her work if we can't see how she is just one of us. And afraid because affixing someone with otherness is the first stage in allowing that someone to

      15 min read

    • Article

      On Mary Oliver and Resisting Poems of Gladness

      Jan 22, 2019

      Was it possible that, despite my best efforts to resist proscriptive poetry doctrines, somewhere along the line I’d internalized the unspoken tenet that accessible poems of praise and wonder are less worthy of real attention? The post On Mary Oliver

      5 min read

    • Article

      Wendell Berry

      Mar 16, 2020

      Wendell Berry
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Mild-mannered, Solitary Librarian Discovers His Powers

      Jul 3, 2023

      Patrick deWitt, a droll satirist with a pointed taste for the bizarre, made his name with novels full of clever literary hijinks, including “Undermajordomo Minor” and “The Sisters Brothers.” His last book, “French Exit” (2018), was a loopy mother-son

      3 min read

    • Article

      Poet Mary Oliver Dies at 83

      Jan 17, 2019

      Poet Mary Oliver Dies at 83
      2 min read

    • Article

      Starting Over Is What’s Hard: The Millions Interviews Mary Laura Philpott

      May 15, 2019

      It’s frighteningly easy to settle into being someone you don’t want to be, because that settling can happen so gradually. The post Starting Over Is What’s Hard: The Millions Interviews Mary Laura Philpott appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      'Devotions' Collects Five Decades Of Poetry By Mary Oliver

      Oct 18, 2017

      The first thing one notices about Devotions, a survey of Mary Oliver’s poems from more than five decades, is how big the book is – unusually so. At more than 400 pages, it registers palpably on the lap, a pleasant anchor through an autumn afternoon.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Jenny Offill Exerts Herself

      Jan 15, 2020

      I don’t love the language that’s available to talk about this stuff. If you’re not drawn to earnestness, how do you make yourself a more engaged person? The post Jenny Offill Exerts Herself appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 244

      Sep 15, 2019

      The Art of Fiction No. 244
      30 min read

    • Article

      A Sense of Sensibility: On ‘The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick’

      Oct 19, 2017

      In Hardwick’s criticism, we encounter an uncondescending intelligence, a humane sensibility, and a forthright independence of mind for which we, in our scatterbrained era, cannot be grateful enough. The post A Sense of Sensibility: On ‘The Coll

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Sophia Stewart

      Dec 22, 2022

      Sophia Stewart reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Sophia Stewart appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Mary Oliver

      Feb 4, 2019

      IF YOU KNOW ONLY ONE LINE OF MARY OLIVER’S POETRY, IT IS likely a question she posed, one that sums up the infectious wonder that ran through her verse like veins through a leaf. “Tell me,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet wrote in “The Summer Day,” “

      1 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Fiction No. 241

      Sep 15, 2018

      The Art of Fiction No. 241
      26 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek"

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" - Gale

      1

      Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

      Annie Dillard

      1974

      Introduction

      Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974, is a nonfiction work that defies categorization. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, it is often read as an example of American nature writing or as a meditation. Annie Dillard, the author, resists these labels, preferring to think of the book as a theological treatise. The book is frequently described as a collection of essays, but Dillard insists that the work is an integrated whole. Perhaps it is because the book succeeds on so many levels that it has been so widely read and admired.

      The book is a series of internal monologues and reflections spoken by an unnamed narrator. Over the course of a year, she walks alone through the land surrounding Tinker Creek, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Roanoke, Virginia. As she observes the changing of the seasons and the corresponding behaviors of the plants and animals around her, she reflects on the nature of the world and of the God who set it in motion. The narrator is determined to present the natural world as it truly is, not sentimentally or selectively. Therefore, she is as likely to reflect on a frog being sucked dry by an insect as on the slant of light that strikes a certain springtime tree. Whether the images are cruel or lovely, the language is beautiful and poetic, and insistently celebratory.

      Author Biography

      Meta Ann Doak was born into an upper-middle-class family on April 30, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She and her two younger sisters were raised under the influences of their free-thinking parents, their wealthy paternal grandparents who lived nearby, and an African-American domestic servant. Annie was encouraged from the beginning to think and act independently, to tell stories, and to read books. She took piano and dance lessons, socialized at the country club, and attended the Ellis School, a private school for girls where she studied Latin, French, and German. But she had a keen interest in the natural world even as a girl, and assembled collections of rocks, bugs, and other elements of nature, as well as a collection of favorite poems. Dillard has recounted her early years in an autobiography, An American Childhood (1987).

      Dillard's high school years were turbulent. Like many teenagers, she took up smoking and driving fast, and wrote angry poetry about the hypocrisy and emotional impoverishment of the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1