SOURCE: Hart, Henry. “James Dickey: The World as a Lie.” Sewanee Review 108, no. 1 (winter 2000): 93-106.

In the following essay, Hart addresses the problems in researching Dickey's life story, asserting that “nearly everything Dickey said about his life was an embroidery of fiction and fact.”

When James Dickey died on January 19, 1997, most of the obituaries—from the six-column one in the New York Times to the shorter ones in Time and Newsweek—paid tribute to the big, life-loving, hard-drinking bard who had written the best-selling novel Deliverance. The eulogists pointed out that he had been a star college football player, a combat pilot with one hundred missions during World War II and the Korean War, an advertising executive for the Coca-Cola company, a tournament archer and expert bow-hunter, a National Book Award-winning poet, a poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, a popular professor, and an author of poetry...