Dickey arrived when he received a National Book Award for Buckdancer's Choice (1965). At this time he lived on Lake Katherine in Columbia, South Carolina, with his wife, Maxine Syerson Dickey, and younger son Kevin. He reached a new audience with an ominous best-selling adventure novel, Deliverance (1970), set on an undesignated river north of Atlanta. Two years later, the story made an even more menacing film.
Dickey achieved less critical impact in the last decades of his career, when he published The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970), The Zodiac (1976), and Puella (1982), as well as two volumes of poetic prose: Jericho: The South Beheld (1974), illustrated by painter Hubert Shuptrine; and God's Images (1977). His novels include Alnilam (1987) and To the White Sea (1993), and five critical volumes: The Suspect in Poetry (1964), Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now (1968), Self-Interviews (1970), Sorties (1974), and Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords (1983).
Dickey died on January 19, 1997, from alcoholism and lung fibrosis.
