SOURCE: Spears, Monroe K. “James Dickey as a Southern Visionary.” Virginia Quarterly Review 63, no. 1 (winter 1987): 110-23.

In the following essay, Spears places Dickey and his work within the context of the Southern literary tradition.

Some years ago James Dickey, who will be 64 next month, responded to an interviewer's question about the sense in which he was a Southern writer with the ringing declaration that “the best thing that ever happened to me was to have been born a Southerner. First as a man and then as a writer.” He would not want to feel that he was limited in any way by being a Southerner or was expected to “indulge in the kind of regional chauvinism that has sometimes been indulged in by Southern writers,” he said, but the tragic history of the South gave him a set of values “some of which are deplorable, obviously, but also...