James Dickey

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James Lafayette Dickey (February 2, 1923 – January 19, 1997), was an American poet and novelist.

In 1966, he was elected the eighth United States Poet Laureate.

He also received the Order of the South award.

Dickey is best known for his book Deliverance (1970), which was turned into an award-winning film of the same name.

Early years

Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended North Fulton High School in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. Dickey graduated from North Fulton High in 1941 and spent a year at Darlington School in Rome, Georgia. Dickey requested to be barred from the Darlington rolls in 1981, the principal's letter describing the school as the most "disgusting blend of cant, hypocrisy, cruelty, class privilege, and inanity I have ever encountered at any human institution." He attended Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina in 1942 and played on the football team as a tailback. He dropped out of school to enlist in the military after a semester. Dickey served with the United States Army Air Forces in the Pacific Theater, where he served thirty-eight missions with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron, an experience that influenced his work and for which he was given five Bronze Stars. 2. During the Korean War, he served in the US Air Force during the Korean War. He attended Vanderbilt University, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in English and philosophy (as well as minoring in astronomy) in 1949. He also obtained an M.A. Vanderbilt's in English was released in 1950.

Personal life

He married Maxine Syerson in November 1948 and three years later they had their first son, Christopher; a second son, Kevin, was born in 1958.

Christopher Dickey, a novelist and journalist, was a Middle Eastern reporter for Newsweek, providing Middle East coverage. Christopher wrote a book in 1998 about his father and Christopher's own sometimes complicated friendship with him, called Summer of Deliverance. Christopher died in July 2020.

Kevin Dickey, an interventional radiologist who lives in Winston-Salem, NC, is a neonatal scholar.

Deborah Dodson, one of Maxine's students, married him two months after she died in 1976. Bronwen's daughter was born in 1981. Bronwen is a writer, editor, and lecturer. Pit Bull: The Struggle Over an American Icon was her first book, published in 2016.

Dickey died on January 19, 1997, six days after his last class at the University of South Carolina, where he began teaching as poet-in-residence from 1968. Dickey spent his remaining years in and out of hospitals, being hospitalized with severe alcoholism, jaundice, and later pulmonary fibrosis.

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Career

Dickey taught English at Rice University (then Rice Institute) in Houston, Texas in 1950, and after his second Air Force service stint, from 1952 to 1954, Dickey returned to academic teaching. Dickey's teaching career 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 titled The Father's Body; he resigned rather than apologize. Some commentators believe he exploited his opportunity when he began selling Coca-Cola and Lay's potato chips while still in his spare time writing some of his best poetry. He once said he embarked on his advertising career in order to "make some money." "I was selling my soul to the devil all day, and at night, trying to buy it back at night." Dickey continued. He was ultimately fired for shinning his employment duties.

In 1960, Into the Stone and Other Poems became his first book. Drowning with Others was published in 1962, which resulted in a Guggenheim Fellowship (Norton Anthology, The Literature of the American South), pp. 1. Buckdancer's Choice (1965) received him a National Book Award for Poetry. "The Performance," "Cherrylog Road," "The Firebombing," "May Day Sermon," "Falling," and "For The Last Wolverine" are among his more popular poems.

After being appointed a poetry advisor for the Library of Congress, he published his first collection of collected poems, Poems 1957-1967. Dickey's best work may be represented in this collection. Dickey returned to academia in earnest in 1969 as a professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, where he lived for the remainder of his life. It was also inducted into the National Leadership Honor Society, Omicron Delta Kappa, in 1970.

In honor of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Dickey wrote the poem The Moon Ground for Life magazine. On July 20, 1969, his reading of it was shown on ABC television.

Since the film version of his novel Deliverance was released in 1972, his fame has grown. Dickey wrote the screenplay and appeared in the film as a sheriff.

Dickey was invited to read his poem The Strength of Fields, 1977, 378-379 at Jimmy Carter's inauguration on January 20, 1977.

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