Deliverance [1970] - James Dickey

"I think the machines are going to fail, the political systems are going to fail, and a few men are going to take to the hills and start over."

Four city slickers (translation: Atlanta yuppies) - Ed, Lewis, Bobby and Drew - take a weekend canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River in the mountains of Georgia that devolves into a total nightmare involving a couple of redneck yahoos (translation: "Squeal like a pig!").

Although James Dickey is remembered in academic circles as one of the greatest poets of his generation, his fame today rests almost entirely on his poetic novel, Deliverance, published in 1970. Dickey claimed he wrote novels just to pay the bills. Born in Atlanta in 1923, Dickey played football at Clemson University but dropped out to join the Army Air Corps during World War II. He served as a radar operator with the 418th Night Fighter Squadron. After the war, he attended Vanderbilt University, where he earned a BA and MA in English. He married Maxine Syerson in 1948. After brief stints teaching at Rice University and the University of Florida, and serving in the Air Force during the Korean War, Dickey switched career paths and started writing jingles for a couple of big-city advertising agencies. Frustrated and bored with his new profession, Dickey turned to poetry (and booze!) as an outlet for the confining, banal world of corporate America. His first published volume of poetry "Into the Stone" appeared in 1960 for which he earned a whopping $114 in royalties. In 1966, he received the prestigious National Book Award in 1966 for his book of poetry "Buckdancer's Choice." Dickey did have his critics, however. For instance, fellow poet Robert Bly once called Dickey a "huge blubbery poet, pulling out Southern language in long strings, like taffy...a sort of Georgia cracker Kipling."

With success, Dickey started to live out the myth of the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, womanizing poet - an attitude that only intensified after the astronomical success of his first novel, Deliverance. Only Erich Segal's melodramatic Love Story kept Deliverance from reaching No. 1 on the bestseller list. The success of the film version only helped Dickey along on his rapid path toward self destruction. In his revealing memoir, Summer of Deliverance, Dickey's son, Chris, states: "I blamed Deliverance for what happened to my father and our family," said Dickey's son Christopher in Summer of Deliverance. "It seemed to me then and for a long time afterward that forces of self-indulgence and self-destruction, which were always there in my father but held in check, were now cut loose." Dickey died at the age of 73 in 1997. He is buried in the All Saints Waccamaw Episcopal Church cemetery on Pawley's Island, South Carolina.