GUY DAVENPORT (1927-2005)

Guy Davenport’s The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing provides a wide representation of his work. He was a writer, illustrator, teacher, scholar, translator, and critic. He taught at Haverford College and the University of Kentucky. In an essay, Davenport claimed to “live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars.” He published over forty books and received a MacArthur fellowship, among other honors

Joyce Carol Oates described James Dickey’s perspective as a desire to “to take on ‘his’ own personal history as an analogue to or a microscopic exploration of 20th-century American history.” Dickey described his style as “country surrealism.” He flew more than 100 combat missions during World War II. “I came to poetry with no particular qualifications,” he recounted in Howard Nemerov’s Poets on Poetry. “I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet—or a kind of poet—buried in every human being like Ariel in his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison.” Dickey is the author of Deliverance and more than two dozen volumes of poetry. The Complete Poems of James Dickey was published in 2013.

Sydney Lanier was an American musician, poet, and author. He served in the Confederate Army and worked on a blockade running ship, for which he was imprisoned. He often used dialects in his poetry and sometimes wrote in heightened English. He wrote Hymns of the Marshes; his most famous poems include “Corn,” “The Symphony,” “Centennial Meditation,” “The Song of the Chattahoochee,” “The Marshes of Glynn,” and “Sunrise.” The Sidney Lanier Cottage in Macon, Georgia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Many schools, lakes, streets, and buildings bear the name Sidney Lanier.

Lillian Smith (1897-1966)

Lillian Eugenia Smith was born in Jasper, Florida in 1897. When her father’s Florida businesses failed in 1915, the Smith family came to Rabun County, Georgia, where her father had recently acquired property on Screamer Mountain and where he opened a summer camp for girls. At first Lillian worked with her family to create the camp, but with her father’s blessing, she soon became the owner and director of Laurel Falls Camp for Girls. This institution continued until 1949 and developed quite a reputation for being a progressive and well-rounded camp for young women, not only throughout the South, but across the country.

Lillian Smith emerged in the 1940s at the forefront of the Southern debate on segregation, where she was at least a decade ahead of other white liberals and stood virtually alone in calling for an immediate end to segregation laws and practices. Meanwhile, she was developing her talents as a fiction-writer. Her 1944 debut novel, Strange Fruit, was about a secret interracial love affair in a small Georgia town. In 1949 she published Killers of the Dream, a brilliant psychological and autobiographical work warning against the evils of segregation. Before her death in 1966, Smith would go on to publish several more books, fiction and nonfiction, and numerous articles and essays on social justice and racial equality, all of which were written from her home on Screamer Mountain.