An American Childhood

“Tavia Gilbert delivers the poetic words with all the meaning and emotion that Dillard invested in them. It would be easy for a narrator to lull the listener to sleep with the microscopic details of the memoir, but Gilbert’s portrayal of a quiet yet vital life captures the listener’s attention. Listeners will hear Dillard’s respect for life, nature, and family clearly in Gilbert’s careful delivery.” AudioFile

“A vivid and thoughtful evocation of particular personal experiences that have an exuberantly timeless appeal.” Chicago Sun-Times

“The reader who can’t find something to whoop about in this book is not alive. An American Childhood is perhaps the best American autobiography since Russell Baker’s Growing Up.” Philadelphia Inquirer

“Loving and lyrical, nostalgic without being wistful, this is a book about the capacity for joy.” Los Angeles Times

“By turns wry, provocative, and sometimes breathtaking…This is a work marked by exquisite insight.” Boston Globe

“An American Childhood is a charming and delightful reminiscence that helps cement Annie Dillard’s reputation as one of our major writers.” San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

“With the publication of An American Childhood in 1987, poet, essayist, naturalist, novelist, and critic Annie Dillard helped usher in the age of memoirs. Following by only a few years the groundbreaking memoirs of Russell Baker and Eudora Welty, Childhood, like these predecessors, defined a literary genre…With good reason, An American Childhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a bestseller. It’s easy reading—happy reading, even—and, at least for me, it’s lively and whimsical, but serious enough so that it doesn’t creep over into the saccharine.” Washington Post

“Dillard’s luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood…The events of childhood often loom larger than life; the magic of Dillard’s writing is that she sets down typical childhood happenings with their original immediacy and force.” Publishers Weekly

“An American Childhood does all this so consummately with Annie Dillard’s ’50s childhood in Pittsburgh that it more than takes the reader’s breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you’re a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood.” Chicago Tribune