James Dickey Biography and List of Works

American poet, novelist, critic, athlete, and hunter with bow and arrow, best known from his novel DELIVERANCE (1970), an adventure story of four businessmen canoeing down a dangerous river in rural Georgia. The trip becomes a nightmare of survival and the men find that the real danger to their lives comes from themselves and other humans. However, Dickey's dominant medium was poetry, not best-selling fiction. Dickey wrote of violence, power, fertility and the primeval instincts of nature. He maintained that poetry should be concerned with basic emotions. In his interest in sports and battle, the author came close to Ernest Hemingway.

  'Funny thing about up yonder,' he said. 'The whole thing's different. I mean the whole way of taking life and the terms you take it on.'
   'What should I know about that?' I said.
   'The trouble is,' he said, 'that you not only don't know anything about it, you don't want to know anything about it.'
   'Why should I?'
   'Because, for the Lord's sake, there may be something important in the hills. Do you know that?'
(from Deliverance)

 

James Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia. In high school and at Clemson College Dickey played football and gave promise of an athletic career. In 1942 he interrupted his education and joined the air force. Dickey served as a radio intercept officer; the pilot that he frequently rode with was Earl E. Bradley. During this period Dickey started to read poetry. He claimed that he "eased into poetry" during an artillery attack in the South Pacific. Dickey continued to study literature, earning his M.A. degree from Vanderbilt University in 1950. But academic career did not attract him. When the Korean War broke out, Dickey served as a training officer in the Air Force. After the war he worked as a teacher and from 1956 to 1959 he was as an advertising copywriter for McCann-Erickson in New York.

A shudder of joy runs up
The trunk: the needles tingle;
One bird uncontrollably cries.
The wind changes round, and stir
Within another's life. Whose life?
(In the Tree House at Night, 1962)

With little awareness of formal poetics, Dickey began to write verse in the late 1940s. His first book, INTO THE STONE, was published in 1960. The tightly constructed poems explored death and renewal - themes in which he returned in the subsequent works. His fourth collection of verse, BUCKDANCER'S CHOICE, won in 1965 the National Book Award. In its poems Dickey formed from horrifying missions of bombers and reminiscences of war powerful pictures of human suffering and moments of compassion. THE ZODIAC (1976) was a long poem in 12 parts. The title work of the STRENGHT OF FIELDS was written for President Carter's inauguration. Its other poems dealt with the masculine aggressiveness and exhilaration of sports. PUELLA (1982) described a girl's coming of age. Among Dickey's most often anthologised works is 'Falling,' which records the steam-of-conscious sensations of an airline stewardess as she falls to her death from a plane.

Dickey devoted himself entirely to writing when his poetry started to gain recognition. He also worked as a teacher and writer-in-residence at a number of U.S. colleges and universities, among others at the University of South Carolina. From 1966 to 1968 he served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Dickey was known for his outspoken criticism of his contemporaries, which were collected in THE SUSPECT IN POETRY (1964) and BABEL TO BYZANTIUM. Among his other publications are the autobiographical works SELF-INTERVIEWS (1970) and JERICHO: THE SOUTH BEHELD (1974).

In the 1970s Dickey published little. His first wife died in 1976 and in the same year he married Deborah Dodson; they had one daughter. Dickey was an associate editor of the Esquire magazine and Sewanee Review in the early 1970s, and advisory editor of Shenandoah literary review. Among his several awards were the Guggenheim fellowship (1962), National Book award (1966), American Academy grant (1966), and Médicis prize (1971). Dickey also received honorary degrees from 13 American universities.

"The poet is not trying the tell the truth. He's trying to make it."

Dickey's works include some 30 collections of poems, several collections of essays and three novels, of which TO THE WHITE SEA (1993) was the last. The war story depicted an American bomber pilot Muldrow on his bloody journey form Tokyo through Japan during the World War II. Dickey died on January 19, 1997.

For further reading: The New Poets by M.L. Rosenthal (1967); Understanding James Dickey by Ronald Baughman (1985); James Dickey by Richard J. Calhoun (1983); The Imagination as Glory, ed. by B. Weigl, T.R. Hummer (1984); Summer of Deliverance by Christopher Dickey (1998); James Dickey: A Descriptive Bibliography by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1990) - See also WW II pilots who became writers: Joseph Heller, who flew 60 combat missions in WW II and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who disappeared in 1994 in flight over Mediterranean.

INTO THE STONE, (1960)