James Lafayette Dickey (February 2, 1923 January 19, 1997) was an American poet, novelist, critic, and lecturer. He was appointed the 18th United States Poet Laureate in 1966. His other accolades included the National Book Award for Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Although acclaimed as a poet, Dickey is most widely known for his debut novel Deliverance (1970), which he adapted into the acclaimed 1972 film of the same name. He was previously a decorated veteran of the Second World War and the Korean War, as a navigator in the United States Air Force's 418th Night Fighter Squadron.
Early years Dickey was born to lawyer Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended North Fulton High School in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. After graduation from North Fulton High in 1941, Dickey completed a postgraduate year at Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. Dickey asked to be dismissed from the Darlington rolls in a 1981 letter to the principal, deeming the school the most "disgusting combination of cant, hypocrisy, cruelty, class privilege and inanity I have ever since encountered at any human institution." In 1942, he enrolled at Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina and played on the football team as a tailback. After one semester, he left school to enlist in the armed services. During World War II, Dickey served with the U.S. Army Air Forces, where he flew thirty-eight missions in the PacificTheater as a P-61 Black Widow navigator and radar operator with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron, an experience that influenced his work, and for which he was awarded five Bronze Stars. He later served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. Between the wars, he attended Vanderbilt University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in English and philosophy (as well as minoring in astronomy) in 1949. He also received an M.A. in English from Vanderbilt in 1950.
Career Dickey taught as an instructor of English at Rice University (then Rice Institute) in Houston, Texas in 1950 and following his second Air Force stint, from 1952 to 1954, Dickey returned to academic teaching. Dickey then quit his teaching job at the University of Florida in the spring of 1956 after a group of the American Pen's Women's Society protested his reading of the poem called The Father's Body; he quit rather than apologize. Some critics believe that he manipulated this incident to his advantage. He became a successful copy writer for advertising agencies selling Coca-Cola and Lay's potato chips while in his free time writing some of his best poetry. He once said he embarked on his advertising career in order to "make some bucks." Dickey also said "I was selling my soul to the devil all day... and trying to buy it back at night." He was ultimately fired for shirking his work responsibilities.
His first book, Into the Stone and Other Poems, was published in 1960. Drowning with Others was published in 1962, which led to a Guggenheim Fellowship (Norton Anthology, The Literature of the American South). Buckdancer's Choice (1965) earned him a National Book Award for Poetry. Among his better-known poems are "The Performance", "Cherrylog Road", "The Firebombing", "May Day Sermon", "Falling", and "For The Last Wolverine".
He published his first volume of collected poems, Poems 1957-1967 in 1967 after being named a poetry consultant for the Library of Congress. This publication represents Dickey's best-known poetry. After serving as a visiting lecturer at several institutions from 1963 to 1968 (including Reed College, California State University, Northridge, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Washington University in St. Louis and the Georgia Institute of Technology), Dickey returned to academia in earnest in 1969 as a professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, a position he held for the remainder of his life. It was there that he was also inducted into Omicron Delta Kappa, the National Leadership Honor Society, in 1970.
Dickey wrote the poem The Moon Ground for Life magazine in celebration of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. His reading of it was broadcast on ABC television on July 20, 1969.
His popularity exploded after the film version of his novel Deliverance was released in 1972. Dickey wrote the screenplay and had a cameo in the film as a sheriff.
On January 20, 1977, Dickey was invited to read his poem The Strength of Fields at the inauguration of Jimmy Carter.
Personal life In November 1948 Dickey married Maxine Syerson, and three years later they had their first son, Christopher; a second son, Kevin, was born in 1958.
Christopher Dickey was a novelist and journalist, providing coverage from the Middle East for Newsweek. In 1998, Christopher wrote a book about his father and Christopher's own sometimes troubled relationship with him, titled Summer of Deliverance. Christopher died in July 2020.
Kevin Dickey is an interventional radiologist and lives in Winston-Salem, NC.
Two months after Maxine died in 1976, Dickey married one of his students, Deborah Dodson. Their daughter, Bronwen, was born in 1981. Bronwen is an author, journalist, and lecturer. Her first book, Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon, was published in 2016.
Death Dickey died on January 19, 1997, aged 73, six days after his last class at the University of South Carolina, where from 1969 he taught as poet in residence. Dickey spent his last years in and out of hospitals, afflicted with severe alcoholism, jaundice and later pulmonary fibrosis.
Works Publications Novels
Poetry
Into the Stone and Other Poems (in Poets of Today VII) (1960) Drowning with Others (1962) Two Poems of the Air (1964) Helmets (1964) Buckdancer's Choice: Poems (1965) —winner of the National Book Award Poems 1957-67 (1967) The Achievement of James Dickey: A Comprehensive Selection of His Poems (1968) The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970) Exchanges (1971) The Zodiac (1976) The Owl King (1977) Veteran Birth: The Gadfly Poems 1947-49 (1978) Tucky the Hunter (1978) Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free-Flight Improvisations from the unEnglish (1979) The Strength of Fields (1979) Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems (1981) The Early Motion (1981) Puella (1982) Värmland (1982) False Youth: Four Seasons (1983) For a Time and Place (1983) Intervisions (1983) The Central Motion: Poems 1968-79 (1983) Bronwen, The Traw, and the Shape-Shifter: A Poem in Four Parts (1986) Summons (1988) The Eagle's Mile (1990)
The Selected Poems (1998) The Complete Poems of James Dickey (2013) Death, and the Day's Light (2015)
Illustrated prose
Non-fiction
Filmography
Deliverance (novel / screenplay) (1972) - Sheriff Bullard (cameo film role) The Call of the Wild (screenplay) (1976)
References
External links
The James Dickey Page James Dickey papers at the University of South Carolina Department of Rare Books and Special Collections James Dickey Newsletter & Society CNN Audio Clips with James Dickey 1977 audio interview of James Dickey by Stephen Banker James Dickey at Academy of American Poets — with brief biography and selected list of works James Dickey Papers at Washington University in St. Louis Joyce Morrow Pair collection of James Dickey at the University of South Carolina Department of Rare Books and Special Collections Matthew J. Bruccoli collection of James Dickey at the University of South Carolina Department of Rare Books and Special Collections Donald J. and Ellen Greiner collection of James Dickey at the University of South Carolina Department of Rare Books and Special Collections James Dickey in New Georgia Encyclopedia James Dickey at Modern American Poetry
James Dickey Revisited - online "themed issue" of the South Carolina Review that collects all pieces by and about James Dickey that have been published in that literary journal since 2001, in addition to content related to a James Dickey Festival that was hosted at Clemson University. Bronwen Dickey on her father's legacy Clark Powell Harbinger, "James Dickey: A Personal Memory"
James Dickey Papers at Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library