An American Childhood

Throughout her autobiography, Dillard deliberately uses elements in her writing drawn from the Romantic period in American literature, and particularly from the Transcendentalist Club writers from Concord, Massachusetts, which included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, among many others. Dillard comments:

Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example excited me enormously. Emerson was my first crack at Platonism, Platonism as it had come bumping and skidding down the centuries and across the ocean to Concord, Massachusetts …I wrote a paper on Emerson’s notion of the soul—the oversoul, which, if I could banish from my mind the thought of galoshes (one big galosh, in which we have our being), was grand stuff. (236)

Dillard’s most significant borrowing occurs when she uses the metaphor of flowing water, carrying her along with it, to indicate the passage of time. Dillard finds union between the natural world and the written word: “I flung myself into poetry as into Niagara Falls” (234). This sentiment demonstrates Dillard’s version of finding truth in books and nature, unified into one metaphor.

Additional images that depict Dillard’s psyche as immersed in nature occur frequently during her studies of the natural world. The Prologue of the