What events influenced the way Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek?

In
by , an unnamed narrator explores the area around Tinker Creek in the Blue
Ridge Mountains while offering observations about life, religion, solitude, and the natural
world. She divides the book into sections matching the seasons of the year. When
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published, it received great critical acclaim
and won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Several events influenced the way that
Dillard wrote the book.

First of all, Dillard wrote her
master's thesis on "Walden Pond and Thoreau." Critics have often compared
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to Thoreau's masterpiece
Walden. Both have solitary narrators making observations on nature,
literature, and other subjects in natural settings. They are structured similarly. Dillard
greatly admired Thoreau's work, and considered Walden Pond a "perfect " and
"vehicle for thought."

Secondly, although
Dillard did not live in the wilderness as Thoreau had but rather in a normal suburban
neighborhood with her husband, she began to take long walks in the natural areas around her
home. As she strolled, she would constantly encounter fascinating natural phenomena such as
local animals. She also read widely during the same period. From her personal observations and
her readings, she wrote 20 volumes of journals from which she drew the material for
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. From her journals, she assembled 1,100 note cards
full of facts, quotes, anecdotes, and ideas. She would shuffle them around to try to come up
with the best order for the material.

Finally, Dillard
began writing the book for one or two hours a day from home, but as the ideas caught on and she
became immersed in it, she found that she needed a place where she could be completely cut off
from the commonplace. As she explains in her book , she rented a cubicle in
the library at a nearby college. Even the mundane view outside the window distracted her, so she
lowered the blinds to further isolate herself and wrote for 15 to 16 hours a day until she
finished the book.

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