Pulitzer-winning author Annie Dillard dies at 81

Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose luminous prose bridged nature, spirituality and everyday life, has died at 81. Her literary agent, Rob McQuilkin, confirmed that Dillard died on Tuesday of natural causes at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Dillard's breakthrough 1974 book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, made her an heir to Henry David Thoreau and earned the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975 for its meditative observations of the natural world. The book drew upon her private writings about the surroundings of her home in Roanoke, Virginia, and established her as a major American literary voice before she turned 30. Over five decades, Dillard completed a wide-ranging body of work that resisted easy categorization. Her other books included the historical novel The Living, the memoir An American Childhood, and The Maytrees, a novel about decades of love between an artistic couple on Cape Cod that was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2008. For writers and students of the craft, her slim 1989 volume The Writing Life became an enduring favorite, examining the solitude and discipline involved in putting words onto a page.