Annie Dillard is the author and the sole viewpoint character of Holy the Firm. By the time Dillard wrote Holy the Firm, she had already written 1974’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which solidified her reputation as a nonfiction nature writer. Holy the Firm shares many thematic and formal similarities with Pilgrim, particularly in the way that both works aim to understand God through close study of nature. Dillard, born April 20, 1945, was 31 when she set out to write about the three-day period in Puget Sound that would eventually turn into Holy the Firm. Though the book is only 66 pages, it took Dillard 14 months of full-time work to complete it.

Dillard’s visions could lead readers to construe her as an unreliable narrator, but that risks missing the larger themes of the work. Much of the book’s narrative relies on Dillard’s accounts of the world and her visions as she experiences them; this leads to subtle changes in scenery or other concrete facts in a way that would, in other texts, signal unreliability. These changes, along with Dillard’s visions, are better understood as a direct representation of her understanding of the physical world.