In Memoriam: Annie Dillard (1945–2026)
The Fine Arts Work Center mourns the loss of Annie Dillard, who died on September 15, 2026, at her home on Pleasant Point in South Wellfleet. She was 81.
Annie was one of the great American writers of the natural and spiritual world. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1975, when she was 29. Over the next five decades she wrote Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk, An American Childhood, The Writing Life, For the Time Being, and the novels The Living and The Maytrees. In 2015 she received the National Humanities Medal.
She was also our neighbor. Annie made her home in South Wellfleet in the 1980s and spent much of her life on the Outer Cape. She loved the dune shacks of the Province Lands, and she gave friends famously elaborate directions for finding their way through the dunes. The Maytrees, her 2007 novel about a lifelong marriage, is set in Provincetown. In her later years she took up painting the tidal flats outside her window.
For generations of FAWC Fellows and for the many writers and artists who have made a life on the Cape, Annie showed what it means to pay attention. She believed looking closely was a moral act and that the writing life asks for everything you have. She put it simply: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Her books are on the shelves of our studios and are passed from one Fellow to the next. Her influence on this community is hard to measure, and it will last.
She is survived by her child, Cody-Rose Clevidence; her stepdaughters Carin Clevidence, Shelly Clevidence, Anne Richardson, and Lissa Richardson; and her sisters, Amy Fields and Molly Simonds. Her husband, the biographer Robert D. Richardson, died in 2020.
We hold her family and friends in our thoughts.
