The conflict between the two European powers took many twists and turns, culminating in 1759 when the British finalized their conquest of the area by taking over the French Fort Duquesne and renaming it after the English prime minister of the time, William Pitt. Although it took some time to develop, war was inevitable. But the area was already full of British trappers and traders, and the eastern seaboard of America was settled by the British as well.

The French, who already held Canada and Louisiana and command of a few scattered posts between the two, were anxious to finalize their control of the interior of the continent by establishing themselves firmly in the Ohio country. Whoever controlled the area known as the “forks of the Ohio River” controlled the gate to the West. The city of Pittsburgh lies at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, a location that was of supreme historical importance in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century power struggle between the French and English, who both sought control of North America. When everything else has gone from my brain-the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family-when all this has dissolved, what will be left, Ibelieve, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that. The finished book begins with the following acknowledgment that the city and its physical setting more deeply affected Dillard than anything else in her life: Events in History at the Time of the Autobiography The making of PittsburghĪn American Childhood is set firmly in Dillard’s hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania the life and times of that city affected the imaginative life of Annie Dillard so greatly that in the first draft of the autobiography, chapters on the history of the city were interspersed with the chapters that deal more directly with her own life. Intimately connected with the specific physical setting of Pittsburgh, An American Childhood insists upon the formative power of landscape upon the people who live in it. The autobiography of her earliest years, An American Childhood traces Dillard’s developing sense of selfhood and independence in her childhood pursuits-baseball, insect- and rock collecting, drawing, poetry, and exploration-focusing on the roots of the artist who would eventually emerge. An autobiography set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s-60s, published in 1987.Ī portrait of Annie Dillard as a young girl, An American Childhood recreates family life and the culture of the American Midwest.Įvents in History at the Time of the Autobiographyīorn Meta Ann Doak in Pittsburgh in 1945 to well-to-do parents, Annie Dillard grew to become America’s most famous theologian of nature, a well-known essayist, poet, novelist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize at the age of thirty.

An American Childhood by Annie Dillard