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James Lafayette Dickey, one of
American’s most distinguished poets and winner of the National Book
Award, was born in 1923 in Atlanta, Georgia.
In
1942, after one year in college, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps
and served as a pilot in the Second
World War. Upon his return to the states, he attended Vanderbilt
University and earned a Master’s degree in 1950. Dickey returned to
military duty in the Korean War, serving with the US Air Force. When
he came back from this, his second tour of duty, he taught at Rice
University in Texas and then at the University of Florida.
In 1955, he left the academic life to work for
advertising agencies. He did this for six years, working in agencies
from New York and Atlanta, but after the publication of his first
book, Into the Stone in 1960, he left advertising and taught
full-time in universities. He was poet-in-residence at Reed
College in Portland, Ore., San Fernando Valley State College in Los
Angeles, and the University of Wisconsin. During that time, he
published the poetry collections `Drowning with Others' (1962),
`Helmets' (1964), and `Two Poems in the Air' (1964), and a
collection of essays.
From 1966 to 1968 Dickey served as
consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. He was awarded the
National Book Award for poetry in 1966 for `Buckdancer's Choice'.
Dickey settled in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1968, where he was
poet-in-residence and a professor of English at the University of
South Carolina. In 1970 the novel `Deliverance' was published to
high praise. Suddenly, this poet was well-known for writing one of
the greatest novels of our time. He also wrote the screenplay for
the popular 1972 motion picture based on the novel and appeared in
the movie. He died in 1997 in Columbia.
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