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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.