James Lafayette Dickey (February 2, 1923 – January 19, 1997) was an American poet and novelist.[3] He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966.[5] He also received the Order of the South award.
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.[2] 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 1941 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."[6]: 47–51 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 military. 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 radar operator with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron, an experience that influenced his work, and for which he was awarded five Bronze Stars.[4]: 2 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. This incident some critics believe he manipulated 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.[7]
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.[8]
Among his better-known poems are "The Performance", "Cherrylog Road", "The Firebombing", "May Day Sermon", "Falling", and "For The Last Wolverine".
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.[9]
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.
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.[11]
Two months after Maxine died in 1976, Dickey married one of his students, Deborah Dodson.[12][13] 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,[14] 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 1968 he taught as poet in residence.
Dickey spent his last years in and out of hospitals, afflicted with severe alcoholism,[12]jaundice and later pulmonary fibrosis.
^Currey, Mason (2 May 2013). "Is the Key to Becoming a Great Writer Having a Day Job?". Slate. eISSN1091-2339. ISSN1090-6584. OCLC1010591826. Archived from the original on 16 June 2021. Retrieved 31 January 2022. James Dickey attempted a similar balancing act between writing and advertising, only he flagrantly deceived his bosses in order to work on his poetry in the office (and eventually got fired for his obvious disregard for his advertising duties).
^Nadeau, Barbie Latza (16 July 2020). "Legendary Foreign Correspondent Chris Dickey Dies in Paris". Europe. The Daily Beast. Archived from the original on 18 January 2022. Retrieved 1 February 2022. We talked at length about what it was like to be the poet and novelist James Dickey's son and about the summer he was on the film set with Burt Reynolds when they filmed Deliverance, which his father wrote. He had just written his memoir Summer of Deliverance and the stories were raw, and he was honest about the pain of his father's genius and his mother's demons.
^Trueheart, Charles (24 May 1987). "James Dickey's Celestial Navigations". The Washington Post. ISSN0190-8286. LCCNsn79002172. OCLC2269358. Retrieved 1 February 2022. In what might be called Dickey's second life, he's the husband of a 35-year-old former student, Deborah Dodson Dickey, called Debba, who is nearly as tall as he, and he is 6 feet 3. He married her in 1976, two months and two days after the death of his first wife. They have a little girl named Bronwen, who is 6.
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.
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