James Dickey

American · 1923 to 1997

Born James Dickey on February 2, 1923, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Eugene and Maibelle Dickey, he grew up in the city's Buckhead neighborhood and attended North Fulton High School, more interested in football and track than in books. He enrolled at Clemson College in 1942 but left after one semester when the war came, joining the Army Air Forces and serving with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron as a radar operator on P-61 Black Widows over the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan, flying 38 combat missions and earning five Bronze Stars. After the war he studied at Vanderbilt, graduating magna cum laude in English and philosophy in 1949 and taking a master's degree there the following year, before further stateside service during the Korean War. He taught briefly at Rice and the University of Florida, then spent five years writing advertising copy in Atlanta, a job he said was like selling his soul to the devil all day and trying to buy it back at night. His early poetry collections, Into the Stone (1960) and Drowning with Others (1962), built toward Buckdancer's Choice (1965), which won the National Book Award and led to his appointment as the eighteenth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. In 1970 he published his only novel, Deliverance, the story of four Atlanta men whose canoe trip down a wild Georgia river turns violent, and two years later wrote the screenplay for its film adaptation, taking a small role himself as the local sheriff. He read his poem The Strength of Fields at Jimmy Carter's presidential inauguration in 1977. He married Maxine Syerson in 1948, with whom he had two sons, and after her death in 1976 married Deborah Dodson, with whom he had a daughter. He taught as poet in residence at the University of South Carolina from 1968 until his death, on January 19, 1997, in Columbia, South Carolina, at the age of seventy-three.