James Dickey
The World as a Lie
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating biography of one of the most popular, colorful, and notorious American poets of our century.
The legendary Southern poet James Dickey never shied away from cultivating a heroic mystique. Like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway, he earned a reputation as a sportsman, boozer, war hero, and womanizer as well as a great poet, novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. But James Dickey made lying both a literary strategy and a protective camouflage; even his family and closest friends failed to distinguish between the mythical James Dickey and the actual man. Henry Hart sees lying as the central theme to Dickey's life; and in this authoritative, immensely entertaining biography he delves deep behind Dickey's many masks. Letters, anecdotes, tall tales and true ones, as well as the reluctant but finally candid cooperation of Dickey himself animate Hart's narration of a remarkable life.
Readers of Dickey's National Book Award-winning poetry, his bestselling novel Deliverance, and anyone who witnessed his electrifying readings of his work will savor this book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to this assiduously researched bio, James Dickey (1923--1997), in the unfortunate tradition of poseur-poets with invented selves who sustain their facades with drink, plunged from dazzling promise to alcoholic decline. Few contemporary biographies have so exhaustively and graphically evoked the rise and self-destruction of a literary reputation. Yet the reader puts down Hart's frankly detailed tome wondering whether the author of Deliverance (1970) was worth the years spent tracking down what Hart depicts as his obsessive lying, his compulsive philandering, his exploitation of intimates, his spiral downward from postmodernist highflier to pathetic wreck. Hart, a poet and literary critic at the College of William and Mary, has produced a page-turner that compels because of the relentlessness of its dissection rather than by any grace of style. Whether anything will survive of Dickey's large literary output is more difficult to assess from this account, as relatively little of his prose or verse is quoted for analysis. Instead, Hart relies on Dickey's swaggering interviews and the many people who were mesmerized by his personality or injured by his abuse. As the poet slowly disintegrates, the impact is less tragic than pathetic. In Deliverance, Hart writes, the narrator "continually debates whether he should tell a story or tell the truth." Dickey apparently had no such qualms. 16 pages b&w photos not seen by PW. FYI: Crux: The Letters of James Dickey, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, was reviewed in Forecasts, Oct. 25, 1999.
