An American Childhood by Annie Dillard

First published: 1987

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1945-1963

Locale: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Principal Personages:

• Annie Doak, the writer as a young girl
• Frank Doak, her father
• Pam Lambert Doak, her mother
• Amy, her younger sister
• Molly, her youngest sister

Form and Content

With An American Childhood, Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), has written an eloquent account of her youth in Pittsburgh. The book covers the years from her birth until her departure for Hollins College in Virginia, yet its form is not that of a traditional autobiography. There are few references to dates or chronological details in Dillard’s portrait of her childhood; rather, the book is a series of vivid impressions and recollections which assume a loosely chronological order as her life unfolds. Its five sections—three parts, a prologue, and an epilogue—divide her childhood into three segments, the first ending when she is ten, the second covering early adolescence, and the third carrying her through her high school years.

The child of well-to-do parents and the eldest of three sisters, Dillard was born in 1945. An American Childhood recalls the people, the events, and the driving intellectual curiosity that shaped Dillard’s early years. An exceptionally bright child, Dillard discovered the world of books at an early age. Seized at intervals by passions for subjects as varied as rock collecting, drawing, insects, and the French and Indian War, she explored them with the aid of her local branch library—and now shares them in detail with her reader. For Dillard, the story of her youth is the story of her intellectual awakening, and she brings it to life with an immediacy that captures the joy she herself felt as she experienced it.

Although the outward trappings of her life—family, school, friends—seem ordinary enough, Dillard’s world is stimulated by her parents, Pam and Frank Doak, an intelligent, outspoken couple with interests and idiosyncrasies that fascinate their children. Frank Doak is a businessman whose love of jazz and Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883) leads him to quit his job when Annie is ten and set off alone down the Ohio River in his boat, bound for New Orleans. He and Annie share a taste for dancing and the poetry of Jack Kerouac. His wife is witty and high-spirited, an expert joke teller who enjoys a silent rivalry with her mother-in-law, lectures Annie on the evils of racism, and challenges her daughters whenever they express an opinion she believes is not their own.

In this upper-middle-class household, marked by private schools, dancing lessons, and summers at the lake with Annie’s grandparents, there is a streak of expressive originality that sparks Annie’s own imagination and encourages a young child with a thirst for knowledge to pursue her interests as far as they will carry her. As the family’s two changes of address expand her knowledge of her immediate physical world, so, too, does Annie’s voracious reading broaden and deepen her grasp of the world beyond her Pittsburgh neighborhood. In her teenage years, she becomes restless and eager to break through the boundaries of the life she knows. Bored with the routine of school, she is moody and furious, shaken deeply by the nameless anger that so often accompanies adolescence. An American Childhood leaves her on the brink of adulthood, anticipating her departure for college and filled with splendid, epic dreams for her future.

Critical Context

By choosing to emphasize the growth of her interior life in her autobiography, Annie Dillard has carved a niche for herself among those writers whose life stories move beyond the details of dates and chronologies of events into the realm of thought and ideas. One senses from the book that what she finds important in her life is her intellectual progress and those elements which contributed to it. The result is an account that grips its readers with the inherent drama of intellectual discovery and speaks directly to those whose own lives have also been shaped by a passion for knowledge and growth.

That Dillard has chosen to label her childhood specifically “American” is also an important consideration, and the fact that her formative years were far from typical, both in the depth and breadth of her reading and in the near-total absence of television as an influence in her development, does not undercut the validity of the title. Born into the postwar era, young Annie possesses all the confidence and energy that the country itself experienced in those years, and her breathless rush toward her awakening as a conscious being has reverberations in the growth and prosperity of the 1950’s. As Annie enters adolescence and the country enters the 1960’s, however, questions and doubts arise, rebellion begins, and everything that has gone before is held up to criticism and reexamination. Indeed, the course that Dillard traces through her childhood is one with striking parallels to that of the United States itself, culminating in Dillard’s departure from Pittsburgh for college and adult life—a striking symbol of the dramatically increased mobility that has become an intrinsic part of the fabric of American life.

Within the scope of Dillard’s own work, An American Childhood can be seen as a companion piece to, or perhaps a logical extension of, the author’s prizewinning Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. In that book, Dillard chronicles the course of one year spent at Tinker’s Creek in Virginia, using her reflections and observations on the natural world as a means of exploring her own thoughts and feelings. The same urgency and absorption in life and nature that inform the earlier book are present in Dillard’s autobiography, and An American Childhood emerges as a vividly realized meditation on one writer’s childhood journey toward intellectual awakening.

Bibliography

Clark, Suzanne. “Annie Dillard: The Woman in Nature and the Subject of Nonfiction.” In Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy, edited by Chris Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989. Clark’s analysis probes Dillard’s prose style in order to question how one knows that this is “woman’s” writing.

Gunn, Janet Varner. “A Politics of Experience: Leila Khaled’s My People Shall Live: The Autobiography of a Revolutionary.” In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. A somewhat advanced study, this essay is nevertheless useful for providing a comparison to Dillard’s focus on the significance of landscape to memory.

Johnson, Sandra Humble. The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1992. A study of literary epiphany, this work examines all Annie Dillard’s writing as a “perusal of illumination.” Includes a secondary bibliography and a thorough index.

Scheick, William. “Annie Dillard: Narrative Fringe.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William Scheick. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. This essay discusses Dillard’s narrative technique as a metaphysical concept.

Smith, Linda L. Annie Dillard. New York: Twayne, 1991. This biographical work sums up Dillard’s career and anticipates its future direction.