Deliverance was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1970, and it was an immediate sensation — a novel that spoke to the anxieties of American masculinity at a moment when those anxieties were particularly acute. Four middle-class men from Atlanta — Ed Gentry (the narrator, an advertising executive), Lewis Medlock (an outdoorsman and survivalist), Bobby Trippe (an overweight optimist), and Drew Ballinger (a gentle guitar player) — decide to canoe the fictional Cahulawassee River before it is dammed and destroyed.
What begins as a weekend adventure becomes a nightmare. Deep in the woods, Bobby is raped by mountain men, Drew is killed (or possibly commits suicide), and Ed must climb a cliff and kill a man with a bow and arrow to save the survivors. The novel’s power lies in its exploration of what happens to civilized men when the rules of civilization are removed: Lewis’s survivalist philosophy, which seemed eccentric in Atlanta, becomes the only relevant wisdom; Ed, the passive suburban everyman, discovers capacities for violence and resourcefulness that suburban life had buried.
Dickey, who was already one of America’s most celebrated poets when the novel appeared, brings a poet’s intensity to the prose: the descriptions of the river, the forest, the physical act of climbing the cliff are rendered with a sensory precision that makes the reader feel the rock beneath his hands. The novel’s most controversial element — the rape scene — is handled with a restraint that makes it more horrifying: Dickey does not linger, does not exploit, but neither does he look away.
John Boorman’s 1972 film adaptation, starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronnie Cox, became one of the most successful and most debated American films of the decade. The “Dueling Banjos” scene and the phrase “squeal like a pig” entered American cultural consciousness permanently.
Collecting Deliverance
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1970): Cloth binding, dust jacket. First printing identified by “First Printing” on copyright page.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $30–$80
- Signed copies: $300–$800
- Film tie-in editions: $10–$25