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A fascinating biography of one of the most popular, colorful, and notorious American poets of our century. The legendary Southern poet James Dickey never shied away from cultivating a heroic mystique. Like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway, he earned a reputation as a sportsman, boozer, war hero, and womanizer as well as a great poet, novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. But James Dickey made lying both a literary strategy and a protective camouflage; even his family and closest friends failed to distinguish between the mythical James Dickey and the actual man. Henry Hart sees lying as the central theme to Dickey's life; and in this authoritative, immensely entertaining biography he delves deep behind Dickey's many masks. Letters, anecdotes, tall tales and true ones, as well as the reluctant but finally candid cooperation of Dickey himself animate Hart's narration of a remarkable life. Readers of Dickey's National Book Award-winning poetry, his bestselling novel Deliverance, and anyone who witnessed his electrifying readings of his work will savor this book.
Summer of Deliverance is a powerful and moving memoir of anger, love, and reconciliation between a son and his father. Hailed as a literary genius of his generation, James Dickey created his art and lived his life with a ferocious passion. He was a heavy drinker, a destructive husband and father, a poet of grace and sensitivity, and, after the publication and subsequent film of his novel, Deliverance, a wildly popular literary star. Drawing on letters, notebooks, diaries, and his explicit conversations with his father, Christopher Dickey has crafted a superb memoir of the corrosive effects of fame, a moving remembrance of a crisis that united a family, and an inspiring celebration of love between father and son.
“You're hooked, you feel every cut, grope up every cliff, swallow water with every spill of the canoe, sweat with every draw of the bowstring. Wholly absorbing [and] dramatic.”—Harper's Magazine The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance. Praise for Deliverance “Once read, never forgotten.”—Newport News Daily Press “A tour de ...
James Dickey: The Selected Poems is the first book to collect James Dickey's very best poems. Like many visionary poets of the ecstatic imagination, Dickey experimented in a wide variety of literary styles. This volume brings together the finest work from each of the periods in Dickey's extremely controversial career. For over three decades, until his death in 1997, Dickey was one of the nation's most important poets; these are the poems that brought him a popular readership and critical acclaim.
Watercolors by Hubert Shuptrine and text by James Dickey present the South as Jericho, "the first city of the Promised Land: the city that fell to Joshua."
Winner of the National Book Award (1966) Winner of the Melville Cane Award (1966) Whoever looks to a new book by James Dickeys for further work in an established mode, or for mere novelty, is going to be disappointed. But those who seek instead a true widening of the horizons of meaning, coupled with a sure-handed mastery of the craft of poetry, will find this latest collection satisfying indeed. Here is a man who matches superb gifts with a truly subtle imagination, into whose depths he is courageously traveling—pioneering—in exploratory penetrations into areas of life that are too often evaded or denied. "The Firebombing," "Slave Quarters," "The Fiend"—these poems, with the others that comprise the present volume, show a mature and original poet at his finest.
From the award-winning, bestselling author of Deliverance and Buckdancer's Choice comes the heart-stopping story of an American tail-gunner who parachutes from his burning plane into Tokyo during the final months of World War II. "A first-rate adventure story".--Newsweek.
This collection includes a foreword by poet Richard Howard, president of the PEN American Center and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 1969 collection, Untitled Subjects.
Robert Kirschten maintains that most formal analyses of Jams Dickey’s poetry have been unsatisfactory or at best only partially complete. Some critics have labeled Dickey an American romantic, while others have called him a mystic, a pantheist, a comic poet. In James Dickey and the Gentle Ecstasy of Earth, Kirschten provides a fuller understanding of Dickey’s lyric vision by employing what Ronald Crane calls “multiple working hypotheses.” The first three of these—mysticism, neoplatonism, and romanticism—serve primarily to align general traits in Dickey’s poetry with familiar literary traditions. The fourth of Kirschten’s hypotheses—primitivism—is drawn from the field of a...