James Dickey was born in a suburb of Atlanta on February 2, 1923. His interest in poetry was awakened by his father, a lawyer who used to read his son famous speeches to the jury. As a boy Dickey read Byron, and later, a volume of Byron's poetry was the the young poet's first purchase. Already tall—six feet three inches—as a boy, he became a high school football star. Dickey attended Clemson College in South Carolina in 1942, but left after a year to enlist in the Air Force. In between combat missions in the Pacific, he read Conrad Aiken and an anthology of modern poetry by Louis Untermeyer, and developed a taste for the apocalyptic poets, including Dylan Thomas and Kenneth Patchen.

When he returned from the war, Dickey enrolled in Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, where he studied anthropology, astronomy, philosophy, and foreign languages as well as English literature. A professor, Monroe K. Spears, encouraged Dickey to write more poetry, and as a senior Dickey had a poem published in the Sewanee Review. Determined to write, he pursued graduate work, first at Vanderbilt, then at Rice University in Texas.

The Air Force recalled Dickey to train officers for the Korean War. On his return he took a position with the University of Florida, where a dispute arose over the propriety of a poem he read to a group. He abruptly resigned in April 1956 and went to New York at the age of thirty-three, where McCann-Ericson soon hired him to write advertising copy. He stayed in New York for several years before moving to Atlanta agencies. In 1961 Dickey gave up the work to accept a Guggenheim Fellowship and spend a year in Italy with his family. Two of his most famous volumes of verse, Helmets (1964) and Buckdancer's Choice—for which he was awarded the National Book Award in 1965—were published soon afterward. Dickey then taught, lectured, and wrote. From 1966 to 1968 he held the position of Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, an office that would later become the Poet Laureate. In 1970 he penned his best-selling novel, Deliverance. The book, which was later made into a major motion picture, exposed readers to scenes of violence and nightmarish horror, much as his poetry had done. In 1977 Dickey read at President Carter's inauguration, and later served as judge of the Yale Younger Poets series.

By the end of his life, Dickey had gained fame for his poems and stories of the South and recognition for his Renaissance lifestyle. A writer, guitar player, hunter, woodsman, and war hero, James Dickey died in South Carolina after a long illness in 1997.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Bronwen, The Traw, and the Shape-Shifter: A Poem in Four Parts (1986)
Buckdancer's Choice (1965)
Drowning with Others (1962)
Exchanges (1971)
Falling, May Day Sermon, and Other Poems (1981)
False Youth: Four Seasons (1983)
For a Time and Place (1983)
Head-Deep in Strange Sounds: Free-Flight Improvisations from the unEnglish (1979)
Helmets (1964)
Intervisions (1983)
Into the Stone and Other Poems (1960)
Poems 1957-67 (1967)
Puella (1982)
The Achievement of James Dickey: A Comprehensive Selection of His Poems (1968)
The Central Motion: Poems 1968-79 (1983)
The Eagle's Mile (1990)
The Early Motion (1981)
The Eye Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970)
The Strength of Fields (1979)
The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1949-92 (1992)
The Zodiac (1976)
Two Poems of the Air (1964)
Veteran Birth: The Gadfly Poems 1947-49 (1978)
Värmland (1982)

Prose

Alnilam (1987)
Babel to Byzantium (1968)
Deliverance (1970)
Exchanges...: Being in the Form of a Dialogue with Joseph Trumbull Stickney (1971)
God's Images: The Bible: A New Vision (1977)
In Pursuit of the Grey Soul (1979)
Jericho: The South Beheld (1974)
Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwards (1983)
Self-Interviews (1970)
Sorties: Journals and New Essays (1971)
Spinning the Crystal Ball: Some Guesses at the Future of American Poetry (1967)
The Enemy from Eden (1978)
The Poet Turns on Himself (1982)
The Self as Agent (1970)
The Starry Place Between the Antlers: Why I Live in South Carolina (1981)
The Suspect in Poetry (1964)
To the White Sea (1993)
Tucky the Hunter (1978)
Wayfarer: A Voice from the Southern Mountains (1988)