A Study Guide for James Dickey's "Deliverance"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for James Dickey's "Deliverance," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535821766

Book preview

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Deliverance

James Dickey

1970

Introduction

When James Dickey's Deliverance was published in 1970, it was an immediate critical and popular hit. Critics and the general public also applauded the movie that was adapted from the novel by Dickey and released two years later. These two accomplishments were considered outstanding achievements for a writer who before Deliverance was known for his poetry. Like a poet, Dickey identified themes and images in his novel that resonate throughout the American psyche. His novel consists of adventure, suspicion, and murder in a natural setting.

In the book, four ordinary suburban men take a canoe trip through the wild hills of north Georgia, hoping to get away from their regulated, sterile lives for a weekend. Along the way they are accosted by uncivilized backwoods dwellers, and the travelers soon find themselves dealing with murder, a cover-up, and more murder and deceit. With sweeping descriptions and precise details, Dickey portrays the development of the novel's narrator, Ed Gentry, as he learns the ways of the forest and the river in his fight for his own survival. As he becomes more primitive, Ed finds himself grateful for this opportunity to live life to its fullest.

Author Biography

James Dickey's life was remarkable for the number of his vocations, any one of which could have kept another person busy for a lifetime. He was a soldier, a teacher, a hunter, a novelist, and an advertising executive. Most of all, though, he was a poet, having produced a number of outstanding, award-winning volumes of poetry. Poetry was the main vocation that he claimed, and it was as a poet that he defined himself.

Dickey was born in 1923, in Buckhead, a suburb of Atlanta. His family was wealthy. In high school and college, he participated on the football team, but after his first year at Clemson, he enrolled in the Air Corps. During World War II, Dickey flew nearly a hundred missions in the Pacific. He claimed that it was while he was in the army that he started writing poetry, although he did not publish any until later. On returning from the war Dickey enrolled in Vanderbilt University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in English in 1949 and his master's in 1950. In 1956, teaching at the University of Florida, Dickey was in the middle of a controversy over a reading of his poem The Father's Body, which some faculty members considered obscene. Angered by what he perceived as censorship, he went to work for a New York advertising agency, working his way up to an executive position before transferring to an Atlanta firm. While he was successful in advertising, he kept writing poetry. His first collection of poems, Into the Stone, and Other Poems, was published, and the following year, after winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, he quit advertising.

During the 1960s, Dickey was poet-in-residence at several colleges, and he published several more books, winning a National Book Award in 1966 for Buckdancer's Choice. In 1968 he became a professor of English at University