Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The Leesburg Proof Sheets
















Much of the novel "Deliverance" was written in this house on North King Street in Leesburg, Virginia, from the summer of 1966 to the summer of 1968, when James Dickey was the poetry consultant at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

While digging through some old documents, we recently came across proof sheets of photographs taken in about 1967 by Christopher Dickey, who was then 16 years old.

They show the house in good weather and bad (with Maxine sweeping snow off the steps and boxwoods). If you explore them you get a sense of what life at home was like in those days, with Jim writing in his office on the top floor, or hosting other writers at the Library of Congress, among them John Updike and Peter Taylor.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:38 PM

    Was any part of the book written in Atlanta GA in a house on Westminster Circle, near West Paces Ferry and Moores Mill?

    Thanks
    Amy
    Tybeelucy2@yahoo.com

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  2. The very early notes for the book were written in the house on Westminster Circle in the autumn of 1963, just after Dickey returned from Europe and before he left to teach in Oregon. The experiences on which the book is loosely based took place when Dickey was living in that house in the late '50s and early '60s.

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