SOURCE: "An Interview with James Dickey," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 117-32.

[In the following interview, conducted in August, 1989, Dickey discusses his work, his life, and his political and literary ideas.]

At the age of thirty-five, James Dickey, in the poem "The Other," wrote of building his body so as to "keep me dying / Years longer." When I arrived at his house on Lake Katherine in Columbia, South Carolina, on August 8, 1989, Dickey asserted, with both eagerness and desperation in his voice, "There is so much I can write, if life will give me the time." An acute awareness of mortality and of its counterpart—the desire to create the illusion that death can be conquered—is never far from the heart of Dickey's work, which is pervaded by thoughts of a brother who died before Dickey was born, the deaths of his parents and friends, the...