James Dickey launched his career as a poet surprisingly late in life. His first collection, Into the Stone and Other Poems, was published when he was thirty-seven years old. Dickey's experience in the military, academic, and advertising worlds before his emergence as a writer provided subjects and training for his art.
             Born on February 2, 1923 in Buckhead, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, to lawyer Eugene Dickey and his wife Maibelle Swift Dickey, James graduated from North Fulton High School. In 1941 he entered Clemson A & M College, where he played wingback on the football team. The following year he joined the Army Air Corps and as a member of the 418th Night Fighter Squadron was involved in more than one hundred bombing missions in the South Pacific.
             After World War II, Dickey attended Vanderbilt University, from which he received a B.A. in English magna cum laude in 1949 and an M.A. in English in 1950. While at Vanderbilt, he published four poems in the campus literary magazine, The Gadfly, and one – "The Shark at the Window"- in the Sewanee Review. During his undergraduate years he married Maxine Syerson, with whom he had two sons – Christopher, born in 1951, and Kevin, born in 1958.
             Dickey's first teaching position, at Rice Institute in Houston, was interrupted when he was recalled by the air force for service in Korea. Following his discharge, he returned to Rice but left there in 1954 to travel and write in Europe on a Sewanee Review fellowship. A 1956 teaching appointment in the University of Florida English department was cut short when Dickey resigned because of a dispute over his reading of his poem "The Father's Body." In April 1956, he began a successful career as copywriter and executive for advertising agencies in New York and Atlanta. During his years as an ad man, Dickey continued writing poetry, for which he received several awards, includ
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