In 1973, Annie Dillard sent an unsolicited manuscript to Harper’s Magazine, which was included in that year’s August issue with the headline “Monster in a Mason Jar.” The essay, along with two other Harper’s pieces, would later appear as chapters in Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974). The book, which chronicles Dillard’s year wandering the Roanoke Valley in Virginia, reflects her keen attunement to the natural world, and, as Christopher Beha noted for Harper’s in 2016, her “effort to reckon with the variety of suffering in the world and to reconcile it all with the beauty and wonder that so often stand alongside it.” Dillard was a contributing editor to Harper’s from 1973 to 1985, with a brief hiatus in 1982. This week, she died at her home in Massachusetts at the age of 81. We at the magazine mourn her loss. This week, we revisit Dillard’s work that investigates the “mysteries performed in broad daylight before our very eyes”: essays on the dazzling violence of insect life, the “extravagant gesture” of creation, the art of seeing, and the measurement of life and death in the twentieth century.