Kirjahaku

In The One Voice of James Dickey, Gordon Van Ness skillfully documents James Dickey's growth from a callow teen interested primarily in sports to a mature poet who possessed literary genius and who deliberately advanced himself and his career. The letters from 1942 through 1969 depict Dickey gradually establishing a self-identity, deciding to write, struggling to determine a subject matter and style, working determinedly to gain initial recognition, and eventually seeking out the literary establishment to promote himself and his views on poetry. The letters also portray a complex personality with broad interests, acute intelligence, and heightened imagination as well as a deep need to re-create his past and assume various roles in the present. Because Dickey's correspondence is so extensive, Van Ness has selected not only those letters that best reveal the development of Dickey's literary career and his conscious efforts to chart its course, but also those that portray his other interests and that depict the various features of his personality. The letters are grouped by decade, with each period placed in perspective by a critical introduction. Together, they yield chronological sense of Dickey - both the writer as a man and the man as a writer, while arguing that he remained ""one voice."" The introductory sections offer a psychological understanding of Dickey's personality by identifying the needs and fears that affected his actions. They also explain the American literary and cultural scene that Dickey confronted as he matured. Because how a writer writes - the appearance of a writer's words on a page - makes a statement, the letters are reproduced here without alterations. There are no silent deletions or revisions; the original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Dickey's letters gathered in The One Voice of James Dickey portray a poet's consciousness, chronicling its growth and revealing its breadth. They do not contain the whole truth, but they are what we have.

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.