Annie Dillard was in her twenties, living beside a creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge, when she spent a year writing what she saw there — muskrats, a mantis laying eggs, a frog that a giant water bug drains to a floating skin while she stands watching. She’s after god in all of it, and she doesn’t sand off the grotesque parts, because a lot of nature turns out to be parasites and appetite. Then she looks up and sees a tree lit from the inside. The prose is extraordinary. What’s hard is the seeing, and she does it for a year. It won the 1975 Pulitzer for general nonfiction.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek