Annie Dillard is the acclaimed author of nine books, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood,
and The Living. She lives in Middletown, CT.
Sample Chapter
When everything else has gone from my brain -- the President's name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where
I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and
finally the faces of my family-when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming
memory of land as it lay this way and that.
I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved
around the hills' curves, rows of bonfires winding. At sunset a red light like housefires shines from the narrow
hillside windows; the houses' bricks burn like glowing coals.
The three wide rivers divide and cool the mountains. Calm old bridges span the banks and link the hills. The Allegheny
River flows in brawling from the north, from near the shore of Lake Erie, and from Lake Chautauqua in New York
and eastward. The Monongahela River flows in shallow and slow from the south, from West Virginia. The Allegheny
and the Monongahela meet and form the westward-wending Ohio.
Where the two rivers join lies an acute point of flat land from which rises the city. The tall buildings rise lighted
to their tips. Their lights illumine other buildings' clean sides, and illumine the narrow city canyons below,
where people move, and shine reflected red and white at night from the black waters.
When the shining city, too, fades, I will see only those forested mountains and hills, and the way the rivers lie
flat and moving among them, and the way the low land lies wooded among them, and the blunt mountains rise in darkness
from the rivers' banks, steep from the rugged south and rolling from the north, and from farther, from the inclined
eastward plateau where the high ridges begin to run so long north and south unbroken that to get around them you
practically have to navigate Cape Horn.
In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the
ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash,
wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their
skin was thinnest.
The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753,
and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for
two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even
a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.
Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina
parakeets-red, green, and yellow-nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the
big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous
gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves-but no one heard any of this, no one
at all.
In 1753, young George Washington surveyed for the English this point of land where rivers met. To see the forest
blurred lay of the land, he rode his horse to a ridgetop and climbed a tree. He judged it would make a good spot
for a fort. And an English fort it became, and a depot for Indian traders to the Ohio country, and later a French
fort and way station to New Orleans.
But it would be another ten years before any settlers lived there on that land where the rivers met, lived to draw
in the flowery scent of June rhododendrons with every breath. It would be another ten years before, for the first
time on earth, tall men, and women lay exhausted in their cabins, sleeping in the sweetness, worn out from planting
corn.
Review
"A remarkable work...an exceptionally interesting account."
--New York Times
"Loving and lyrical, nostalgic without being wistful, this is a book about the capacity for joy."
-- Los Angeles Times
"[An American Childhood] combines the child's sense of wonder with the adult's intelligence and is written
in some of the finest prose that exists in contemporary America. It is a special sort of memoir that is entirely
successful...This new book is [Annie Dillard's] best, a joyous ode to her own happy childhood."
-- Newark Star-Ledger
"The reader who can't find something to whoop about is not alive. An American Childhood is perhaps the
best American autobiography since Russell Baker's Growing Up."
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
"By turns wry, provocative and sometimes breathtaking...This is a work marked by exquisite insight."
-- Boston Globe
"Every paragraph Dillard writes is full of information, presenting the mundane with inventive freshness
and offering exotic surprises as dessert...[Annie Dillard] is one of nature's prize wonders herself--an example
of sentient homo sapiens pushing the limits of the creative imagination. She deserves our close attentions."
-- St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"An American Childhood shimmers with the same rich detail, the same keen and often wry observations as
her first book [Pilgrim at Tinker Creek]."
-- Charlotte Observer
"A vivid and thoughtful evocation of particular personal experiences that have an exuberantly timeless
appeal."
-- Chicago Sun-Times
"An American Childhood does all this so consummately with Annie Dillard's `50s childhood in Pittsburgh
that it more than takes the reader's breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put
down this book, you're a different person, one who has virtually experiences another childhood."
-- Chicago Tribune
HarperCollins Publishers Web Site, October, 2000
Summary
A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer
Prize - winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.