Annie Dillard, who as a young American writer walked into the woods and came out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the wonders and horrors of creation, the modern classic “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” died on Tuesday at her home in South Wellfleet, Mass. She was 81. Her death was confirmed by her literary executor, Maggie Nelson.

With the publication of “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” in 1974, Ms. Dillard, just 28, was recognized as a major new voice in American letters. It was only the beginning of her career: In the years to come, she would publish essays, meditations on religion, poems, a theory of literature, two novels, journalism, a best-selling autobiography and another best seller, “The Writing Life,” about what it takes to put words into a world that has more than enough of them. Reviewers of “Tinker Creek” were quick to understand it as a 20th-century analogue to Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” This was no coincidence: Ms. Dillard had chosen Thoreau as the subject of her master’s thesis at Hollins University, the women’s liberal arts college in Roanoke, Va.

Like Thoreau, she found an unremarkable body of water to be as good a place as any for deep thoughts — particularly about how to reconcile the idea of a benevolent God with nature’s cruelty. Unlike Thoreau, Ms. Dillard didn’t build a cabin in the woods and live there through the seasons of a year. Though her writing could convey the sense of a solitary life in the wilderness, she was mostly a day-tripper.

After her forays into the Roanoke Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains — which was, after all, her neighborhood — she would return home to the suburban house she shared with Richard Dillard, a creative writing instructor she had married at the end of her sophomore year at Hollins. That she was a photogenic young woman coming to grips with raw nature — a business that had been almost exclusively the province of men with beards — was undeniably part of the Dillard mystique. So was her insistence that, in spite of her patient, unflinching observations on flora and fauna, she wasn’t a nature writer, but rather a theologian looking high and low for God.

Among the many things she saw at Tinker Creek was a little green frog, half out of the water, “deflating like a football” before her eyes. It was in the clutches of a giant water bug whose bite had liquefied the frog’s innards. Such encounters could cause “nightmares that plunder rest and force me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans,” she wrote. “But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure,” she added. “I walk out; I see something, some event that otherwise would have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell.” “Tinker Creek” won the Pulitzer for general nonfiction in 1975, and Ms. Dillard was overwhelmed by requests for speeches, interviews and television appearances.

Her looks were thought by many media outlets to be as newsworthy as her writing — so much so that she was ridiculed in some circles as “Cheesecake at Tinker Creek.” Repelled by the consequences of her success, she moved to Washington State and began dividing her time between the city of Bellingham and the islands Waldron and Lummi. Her marriage to Mr. Dillard had ended in amicable divorce, and in the Pacific Northwest, she found privacy enough to regain the concentration essential to her work. “The Cascade Range, in these high latitudes, backs almost into the water,” she wrote. “There is only a narrow strip, an afterthought of foothills and farms sixty miles wide, between the snowy mountains and the sea.” She added: “If the Greeks had looked at Mt. Baker all day, their large and honest art would have broken, and they would have gone fishi...