Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Analysis

Although Dillard grew up in Pittsburgh and references her Pennsylvania childhood a couple of times, she moved to Virginia as an adult. Tinker Creek is just outside the city of Roanoke, which is in...

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a memoir, a nonfiction account of a specific time and place by the person who experienced it. Dillard is telling us what she saw, what she read, and how she felt about it...

And here, Shmoopers, is where we talk about the difference between autobiography and memoir. Sometimes people use those words interchangeably, which is understandable—they are both stories of som...

It doesn't get much more introspective than spending so much time alone in a cabin in the woods that you start to wonder if you're walking on the sky. Just sayin'.Picture this: You read a lot of bo...

Okay, it's like this: You're not going to tear through Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's not going to grab you with its runaway plot and keep you breathless with anticipation, and chances are decent th...

Contrary to what you might expect, there are no pilgrims at Tinker Creek—or at least, not the big-hat-and-buckle-shoes kind. Instead, Dillard's using the word more generally, to refer to "a perso...

Having searched for a loving, omniscient God in the first half of the book and questioned a cruel, careless one in the second, Dillard finds a way to reconcile them. She returns to the cat from the...

We're not just calling this one snow line because it starts in the middle of winter—Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a challenging book, as Pulitzer winners tend to be. There's no plot to speak of; ins...

So, you might be asking yourself, Plot? What plot? This is just some 1970s lady thinking about stuff. And in a way, you're correct.If you think of classic plot structure as "character gets into sit...

Normally, we'd assign a plot structure and talk about how the book follows it, but that's dependent upon the book having a plot. Instead, we're going to talk about transcendentalism. Who needs a pl...

Via PositivaDillard goes to Tinker Creek and observes a whole lotta nature. She wonders why God would make his creations so intricate when all he had to do was make stuff work, and decides that int...

David Ryan hiked the Appalachian Trail and wrote a blog about Tinker Creek, complete with lots of pictures. He even talked to Annie Dillard's former neighbor, whose tree she used to sit in for hour...

Depending on your point of view, nature might be sexy, but there's no actual human sex in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Sure, there's that section about how the female mantis bites the male's head off d...

Nikos Kazantzakis (1.8)Blaise Pascal (1.17; 6.31)Henry David Thoreau (1.28)Stewart Edward White, The Mountains (2.6)Donald E. Carr (2.9)Marius von Senden, Space and Sight (2.22)Edwin Way Teale (3.1...