James Dickey: A Literary Life

The dramatic rise in James Dickey’s reputation in the 1960s and his equally abrupt fall from literary grace during the 1970s is arguably the most distinctive feature of his career. Critics frequently cited alcoholism as the cause for this precipitous decline, which diminished Dickey’s creativity, or they noted his financial success, which undermined his will to achieve. Self-aggrandizement and womanizing, they argued, also contributed to derailing his literary achievements. Reviewers largely denigrated his poetry after the success of his 1970 novel Deliverance or offered ad hominem attacks, failing to acknowledge his startling poetic language and the diversity of his poetic forms that creatively reimagined the world. While they celebrated his early work, they ignored his later poems. Van Ness puts this all in perspective. This literary biography centers on Dickey as poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and teacher, a man who throughout his life did what writers are supposed to do–write. Additionally, he spent time teaching and discussing writing, which is also part of the profession of authorship. From the autobiography Dickey penciled of himself at age five to the poems he composed at the age of seventy-three while dying of fibrosis of the lungs, James Dickey believed in the magic of language, in the possibility of words. Here, author Gordon Van Ness shows Dickey’s artistic beginnings and the rise and fall of his career, the man as a writer. Dickey’s life was indeed complicated, but his words endure, and they merit the highest attention.