An American Childhood

This part begins when Dillard is 15 years old and describes her rage-fueled adolescence. She begins the section with the biography of the great steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, and his impact on the city of Pittsburgh. For example, Dillard attended an art school, for four years, in one of the museums founded by Carnegie.

The elite Scotch-Irish social stratum in which she is being raised becomes a superficial, hypocritical prison to Dillard. She longs for deep and real feelings to replace the surface glitter and glib small talk of her companions. Dillard describes the rigid lives of the women, raising their children at home alone while the equally entrapped men work for the money to keep the whole enterprise afloat. She sees her world, in its desperate finery, reproducing itself generation after generation.

Her last visit to see her grandmother, Oma, in Pompano Beach, Florida occurs when Dillard is 15 years old. She bird-watches and takes advantage of the beach, but everything she is asked to do either enrages or bores her.

Her adolescent outrage hits its peak when she is 16 years old; she becomes wild and unpredictable, even to herself. At times, she feels demented. She blames her parents for the wrongs and injustices of American society.