James Dickey The World as a Lie [Paperback]

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 novelDeliverance, and anyone who witnessed his electrifying readings of his work will savor this book.

This is an exemplary work. Erica da Costa, The New York Times Book Review

Fascinating . . . Henry Hart has done a first-rate job. George Garrett, Washington Times

Exemplary . . . This is the biography the poet deserves. Steve Oney, LA Weekly

This book is destined to become the standard Dickey biography. Library Journal (starred)

Weaving Dickey's own writing into this biographical narrative, Hart provides glimpses of his incisiveness as a critic, his lyric grace as a poet and his dazzling inventiveness as a novelist. Henry L. Carrigan, Chicago Tribune

Thorough and unflinching . . . One finishes this biography with a sense of the enormity of James Dickey's talent and with an equally strong sense of the great waste of his later years. Stephen Ennis, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution