James Dickey Biography

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on James Dickey

Writer James Dickey led a remarkable life as poet, novelist, critic, and screenwriter. Winner of the National Book Award for his verse collection Buckdancer's Choice, Dickey attained national and international fame for his 1970 novel of survival, Deliverance, which also became a popular movie with Dickey himself cast in one of the roles. This advertising man who turned writer was a relentless self-promoter, as well, and created a macho image of himself with his numerous interviews and public statements. This self-image translated to the printed page; he was widely regarded as a major American poet because of what critics and readers identified as his unique vision and style. "It is clear," said Joyce Carol Oates in her New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature, "that Dickey desires to take on 'his' own personal history as an analogue to or a microscopic exploration of twentieth-century American history, which is one of the reasons he is so important a poet." Dickey was called an expansional poet, not only because the voices in his work loomed large enough to address or represent facets of the American experience, but also because his violent imagery and eccentric style exceeded the bounds of more traditional norms, often producing a quality he described as "country surrealism."

One of Dickey's principal themes, usually expressed through a direct confrontation between or a surreal juxtaposition of the world of nature and the world of civilized man, was the need to intensify life by maintaining contact with the primitive impulses, sensations, and ways of seeing suppressed by modern society.

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