She turned her attention to her own world in An American Childhood, a lyrical look at her idyllic and privileged childhood in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

Dillard captures the genius loci of at least a part of the city then and lovingly describes her unorthodox, caring parents. Her father, who not only helped make the classic cult movie “Night of the Living Dead” but read On the Road at least as many times as she did (“approximately a million”), “walked lightly, long-legged, like a soft-shoe hoofer barely in touch with the floor.” Her mother, an “unstoppable force,” always reminded her that she didn’t know everything yet and gave her “the freedom of the streets as soon as I could say our telephone number.” Along with the idea that Annie and her two sisters were “expected to take a stand,” her mother also clearly passed on her love of language. One of Dillard’s hilarious retellings is of her mother overhearing the play-by-play of a Sunday afternoon baseball game and asking of the phrase “Terwilliger bunts one,” “Is that English?” In summing up the compelling characters surrounding her, Dillard writes, “Everyone in the family was a dancing fool,” making us all want that family.

Dillard’s luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the Pirates were always in the cellar. Dillard’s mother, an unstoppable force, had energies too vast for the bridge games and household chores that stymied her. Her father made low-budget horror movies, loved Dixieland jazz, told endless jokes and sight-gags and took lonesome river trips down to New Orleans to get away. From this slightly odd couple, Dillard (Teaching a Stone to Talk acquired her love of nature and taut sensitivity. 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.

“The great outer world hove into view and began to fill with things that had apparently been there all along. . . . I woke at intervals until . . . I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.” Although she is writing at three decades’ remove, we readers feel the immediacy of this child’s time of “heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be.”

With good reason, An American Childhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as a bestseller.