Awaiting the Swimmer

In 1956, James Dickey resigned his teaching position at The University of Florida when his reading of the poem "The Father's Body" to a local women's group was construed as obscene. He took a position as an advertising copywriter and executive for the McCann-Erickson agency in New York, a position he later described as "selling his soul to the devil in the daytime and buying it back at night." Dickey worked in the advertising business until 1961, when he received a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move his family to Italy and devote his time to writing poetry.