SOURCE: "Because It's There: James Dickey and Deliverance," in The Armchair Detective, Vol. 27, May, 1994, pp. 342-45.

[In the following essay, Tapply argues that Dickey's Deliverance is among the great novels of American culture.]

When my friend Mike McGill gave me a book for my thirtieth birthday in 1970, he said, "Don't be put off by the fact that the author's a poet. I think you'll like it. It's got bowhunting and white-water canoeing in it." I devoured Deliverance. James Dickey's prose swept me along the way the river in the story carried the four men in canoes. It accelerated as I read, tossing and twisting and tumbling me so that I could no more put down the book than Ed and Lewis and Bobby and Drew could step out of their canoes in the rocky rapids of the Cahulawassee River in the middle of the Georgia wilderness. When it...