"The second volume of the letters and life of James Dickey. This volume chronicles Dickey's career from the publication of Deliverance through his poetic experimentation in The Eye Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy and Puella. Includes correspondence with Saul Bellow, Arthur Schlesinger, and Robert Penn Warren"--Provided by publisher.

William B. Thesing, James Dickey's colleague at the University of South Carolina for twenty years, has a unique and complex perspective on the life and writing of this great twentieth-century American author. Dickey offers readers, students, and teachers a variety of energized and imaginative texts, and Thesing provides original and perceptive readings of his life and his novels as well as his most popular poems about animals in nature, man in nature, social and sexual relationships, women, and civilian and wartime death. This is the only introductory teaching/study guide available on Dickey's poems and novels. Chapters are conveniently organized around essential thematic categories. The author employs various modern critical approaches - from feminist criticism to deconstruction - to the poems and novels. The book will be useful in college or high school courses on Southern literature, American poetry, and twentieth-century literature.

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.

This is a study of the war poetry of nine American men who served in World War II. The efforts of those who had established themselves as poets prior to or during the war (Karl Shapiro, Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi, and William Meredith) are compared with those whose poetic careers began after the war (Louis Simpson, James Dickey, Richard Hugo, Howard Nemerov, and Lincoln Kirstein). The military careers of these soldiers illuminate how their experiences affected the content as well as style of their poems. Each man's poetry directly related to his involvement with the combat environment: the closer the combat experience, the more personal the poetry; the more distant the experience, the more detached the poetry.

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 force . . . How a man acts when shot by an arrow, what it feels like to scale a cliff or to capsize, the ironic psychology of fear: these things are conveyed with remarkable descriptive writing.”—The New Republic “Freshly and intensely alive . . . with questions that haunt modern urban man.”—Southern Review “A fine and honest book that hits the reader's mind with the sting of a baseball just caught in the hand.”—The Nation “[James Dickey's] language has descriptive power not often matched in contemporary American writing.”—Time “A harrowing trip few readers will forget.”—Asheville Citizen-Times "A novel that will curl your toes . . . Dickey's canoe rides to the limits of dramatic tension."—New York Times Book Review "A brilliant and breathtaking adventure."—The New Yorker