College and Writing Career
Dillard attended Hollins College (now Hollins University), in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied literature and creative writing. She married her writing teacher, the poet R. H. W. Dillard, ten years her senior. Of her college experience, Dillard stated: "In college I learned how to learn from other people. As far as I was concerned, writing in college didn’t consist of what little Annie had to say, but what Wallace Stevens had to say. I didn’t come to college to think my own thoughts, I came to learn what had been thought." In 1968 she earned an MA in English. Her thesis on Henry David Thoreau showed how Walden Pond functioned as "the central image and focal point for Thoreau's narrative movement between heaven and earth." Dillard spent the first few years after graduation oil painting, writing, and keeping a journal. Several of her poems and short stories were published, and during this time she also worked for Johnson's Anti-Poverty Program.
Dillard's works have been compared to those by Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and John Donne. She cites Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Ernest Hemingway as a few of her all-time favorite authors.
Read more about this topic: Annie Dillard
Famous quotes containing the words writing career, college, writing and/or career:
“Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“here
to this college on the hill above Harlem
I am the only colored student in my class.”
—Langston Hughes (1902–1967)
“England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)