George Dickerson
Encyclopedia
George Dickerson is an American
actor
, writer
, and poet
.
, to George Graf Dickerson, a lawyer, and Elizabeth Dickerson (née Naumann), parents he did not have a good relationship with. He has one brother, five years his junior. As a child, he lived in Michigan
, the South Side of Chicago
, Queens, New York, and Virginia
. Since 1965, he has lived in the same apartment in Manhattan
, one once rented by critic James Agee
, whom Dickerson claims to have spiritual contact with.
Dickerson served in the U.S. Army from December 1953 to the fall of 1954. He graduated from Yale University
in 1955, after studying with novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren
and Cleanth Brooks
, advocates of New Criticism
. After working a teaching job in Vermont, Dickerson read his poems at venues with Beatnik
poets such as Gregory Corso
, Diane di Prima
, and Ted Joans
. His poetry was praised by novelist Norman Mailer
.
He has maintained long term friendships with many well-known artists, including songwriter Leonard Cohen
, actor Richard Widmark
, playwright Arthur Miller
, actor Roscoe Lee Browne
, opera soprano
Leontyne Price
, Edna St. Vincent Millay
’s sister, Norma Ellis, John Farrar
, and ex-Poet Laureate Mark Strand
.
In the 1970s, after a decade in the literary world, Dickerson worked as Press Secretary and speech writer for U.S. Congressman Robert Steele (R- Connecticut), and Head of Press and Publications for UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) at its headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, where he experienced the Lebanese Civil War
in 1975 and 1976.
Dickerson has been married four times and has five children: two daughters by his first wife, a son by his third wife, a daughter by his fourth wife, and a son born out of wedlock with a Finnish journalist; Finnish film director Dome Karukoski
. He was romantically involved with 1960s supermodel Veruschka
.
Dickerson speaks five languages: English, French, German, Arabic, and Italian. While not religious, he claims a belief in God. He suffers from Crohn's Disease
.
Dickerson is a Democrat
, and only once voted Republican
, for former New York City mayor John V. Lindsay. Of his politics, Dickerson said, 'I wasn’t involved in the Civil Rights movement. That is a failure on my part. I wasn’t really political until I started writing about world affairs for Time. I didn’t see my Black friends as black and they sensed that, so the subject didn’t come up between us, as hard as that may be to believe. We talked about what close friends talk about when there are no issues between them…struggles with their writing, with their wives…."
magazine, The New Yorker
, and Story
magazine. While reviewing literature for Time, Dickerson helped to promote the careers of such young writers (at that time) as John Irving
, Cormac McCarthy
, Donald Barthelme
, Robert Stone, and Don DeLillo
.
Dickerson has published several short stories and beginning an uncompleted novel. His short story Chico appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1963, and was praised by poet e.e. cummings. His short story A Mussel Named Ecclesiastes appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1966. He has been published in The New Yorker
, Mademoiselle
, The Saturday Evening Post
, Cosmopolitan
, and Penthouse
.
After his time in Lebanon, Dickerson suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and suffered a decades long bout of writer's block
. By the mid-1990s, Dickerson began to write poetry again. A book of his, Selected Poems, was published in 2000, by Rattapallax publishing company and journal, which he helped to found. Dickerson has also written drama, including a one man play, A Few Useless Mementos For Sale.
, as Police Commander Swanson, and playing Detective Williams in David Lynch
's 1986 film Blue Velvet He also starred on the soap opera
Search for Tomorrow
, as well as local theater and independent films, such as Broken Giant, Ties to Rachel, and Stranger in the Kingdom. He had major roles in films like Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
, Psycho II, and After Dark, My Sweet
. Dickerson also guest starred on episodes of shows like Three's Company
, Charlie's Angels
, Little House On The Prairie
, L.A. Law
, and Sledge Hammer.
Dickerson is a member of SAG
, AFTRA, Actors' Equity, the Dramatists' Guild, the Author's Guild, the Academy of American Poets
, and AMPAS.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
, writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, and poet
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
.
Biography
Dickerson was born July 25, 1933, in Topeka, KansasTopeka, Kansas
Topeka |Kansa]]: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...
, to George Graf Dickerson, a lawyer, and Elizabeth Dickerson (née Naumann), parents he did not have a good relationship with. He has one brother, five years his junior. As a child, he lived in Michigan
Michigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
, the South Side of Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, Queens, New York, and Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
. Since 1965, he has lived in the same apartment in Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, one once rented by critic James Agee
James Agee
James Rufus Agee was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S...
, whom Dickerson claims to have spiritual contact with.
Dickerson served in the U.S. Army from December 1953 to the fall of 1954. He graduated from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
in 1955, after studying with novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...
and Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks was an influential American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education...
, advocates of New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...
. After working a teaching job in Vermont, Dickerson read his poems at venues with Beatnik
Beatnik
Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s and early 1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical...
poets such as Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, Diane di Prima
Diane di Prima
Diane Di Prima is an American poet.-Early life:Di Prima was born in Brooklyn. She attended Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College before dropping out to be a poet in Manhattan...
, and Ted Joans
Ted Joans
Theodore "Ted" Joans was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, but not on a riverboat as had been claimed. He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco...
. His poetry was praised by novelist Norman Mailer
Norman Mailer
Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S...
.
He has maintained long term friendships with many well-known artists, including songwriter Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...
, actor Richard Widmark
Richard Widmark
Richard Weedt Widmark was an American film, stage and television actor.He was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as the villainous Tommy Udo in his debut film, Kiss of Death...
, playwright Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American theatre, writing dramas that include plays such as All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge .Miller was often in the public eye,...
, actor Roscoe Lee Browne
Roscoe Lee Browne
Roscoe Lee Browne was an American actor and director, known for his rich voice and dignified bearing.-Biography:Browne was the fourth son of a Baptist minister, Sylvanus S. Browne, and his wife Lovie...
, opera soprano
Soprano
A soprano is a voice type with a vocal range from approximately middle C to "high A" in choral music, or to "soprano C" or higher in operatic music. In four-part chorale style harmony, the soprano takes the highest part, which usually encompasses the melody...
Leontyne Price
Leontyne Price
Mary Violet Leontyne Price is an American soprano. Born and raised in the Deep South, she rose to international acclaim in the 1950s and 1960s, and was one of the first African Americans to become a leading artist at the Metropolitan Opera.One critic characterized Price's voice as "vibrant",...
, Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work...
’s sister, Norma Ellis, John Farrar
John Farrar
John Farrar is a music producer, songwriter, music arranger, singer and guitarist who is best known for his work with Olivia Newton-John with whom he wrote and produced many hit songs....
, and ex-Poet Laureate Mark Strand
Mark Strand
Mark Strand is an American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. Since 2005, he has been a professor of English at Columbia University.- Biography :...
.
In the 1970s, after a decade in the literary world, Dickerson worked as Press Secretary and speech writer for U.S. Congressman Robert Steele (R- Connecticut), and Head of Press and Publications for UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) at its headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, where he experienced the Lebanese Civil War
Lebanese Civil War
The Lebanese Civil War was a multifaceted civil war in Lebanon. The war lasted from 1975 to 1990 and resulted in an estimated 150,000 to 230,000 civilian fatalities. Another one million people were wounded, and today approximately 350,000 people remain displaced. There was also a mass exodus of...
in 1975 and 1976.
Dickerson has been married four times and has five children: two daughters by his first wife, a son by his third wife, a daughter by his fourth wife, and a son born out of wedlock with a Finnish journalist; Finnish film director Dome Karukoski
Dome Karukoski
Thomas "Dome" Karukoski is a Finnish film director, His feature Beauty and the Bastard showed at the Berlin International Film Festival and Tribeca Film Festival in 2006. The film, which stars Pamela Tola, concerns young people in Finland who are caught between conventional careers and more...
. He was romantically involved with 1960s supermodel Veruschka
Veruschka
Vera Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort is a German model, actress, and artist who was popular during the 1960s...
.
Dickerson speaks five languages: English, French, German, Arabic, and Italian. While not religious, he claims a belief in God. He suffers from Crohn's Disease
Crohn's disease
Crohn's disease, also known as regional enteritis, is a type of inflammatory bowel disease that may affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract from mouth to anus, causing a wide variety of symptoms...
.
Dickerson is a Democrat
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
, and only once voted Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
, for former New York City mayor John V. Lindsay. Of his politics, Dickerson said, 'I wasn’t involved in the Civil Rights movement. That is a failure on my part. I wasn’t really political until I started writing about world affairs for Time. I didn’t see my Black friends as black and they sensed that, so the subject didn’t come up between us, as hard as that may be to believe. We talked about what close friends talk about when there are no issues between them…struggles with their writing, with their wives…."
Writing
By 1960, Dickerson was working at the Macmillan Publishing Company. He then worked at TimeTime (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, and Story
Story (magazine)
Story was a magazine founded in 1931 by journalist-editor Whit Burnett and his first wife, Martha Foley, in Vienna, Austria. Showcasing short stories by new authors, 67 copies of the debut issue were mimeographed in Vienna, and two years later, Story moved to New York City where Burnett and Foley...
magazine. While reviewing literature for Time, Dickerson helped to promote the careers of such young writers (at that time) as John Irving
John Irving
John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978...
, Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road...
, Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston , co-founder of Fiction Donald...
, Robert Stone, and Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
.
Dickerson has published several short stories and beginning an uncompleted novel. His short story Chico appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1963, and was praised by poet e.e. cummings. His short story A Mussel Named Ecclesiastes appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1966. He has been published in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, Mademoiselle
Mademoiselle (magazine)
Mademoiselle was an influential women's magazine first published in 1935 by Street and Smith and later acquired by Condé Nast Publications....
, The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...
, Cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitan (magazine)
Cosmopolitan is an international magazine for women. It was first published in 1886 in the United States as a family magazine, was later transformed into a literary magazine and eventually became a women's magazine in the late 1960s...
, and Penthouse
Penthouse (magazine)
Penthouse, a men's magazine founded by Bob Guccione, combines urban lifestyle articles and softcore pornographic pictorials that, in the 1990s, evolved into hardcore. Penthouse is owned by FriendFinder Network. formerly known as General Media, Inc. whose parent company was Penthouse International...
.
After his time in Lebanon, Dickerson suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and suffered a decades long bout of writer's block
Writer's block
Writer's block is a condition, primarily associated with writing as a profession, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work. The condition varies widely in intensity. It can be trivial, a temporary difficulty in dealing with the task at hand. At the other extreme, some "blocked"...
. By the mid-1990s, Dickerson began to write poetry again. A book of his, Selected Poems, was published in 2000, by Rattapallax publishing company and journal, which he helped to found. Dickerson has also written drama, including a one man play, A Few Useless Mementos For Sale.
Acting
Dickerson returned from Lebanon to the United States and became an actor, taking roles in the television series Hill Street BluesHill Street Blues
Hill Street Blues is an American serial police drama that was first aired on NBC in 1981 and ran for 146 episodes on primetime into 1987. Chronicling the lives of the staff of a single police precinct in an unnamed American city, the show received critical acclaim and its production innovations ...
, as Police Commander Swanson, and playing Detective Williams in David Lynch
David Lynch
David Keith Lynch is an American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor. Known for his surrealist films, he has developed his own unique cinematic style, which has been dubbed "Lynchian", and which is characterized by its dream imagery and meticulous sound...
's 1986 film Blue Velvet He also starred on the soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
Search for Tomorrow
Search for Tomorrow
Search for Tomorrow is an American soap opera which premiered on September 3, 1951 on CBS. The show was moved from CBS to NBC on March 29, 1982. It continued on NBC until the final episode aired on December 26, 1986, a run of thirty-five years. At the time of its final broadcast it was the...
, as well as local theater and independent films, such as Broken Giant, Ties to Rachel, and Stranger in the Kingdom. He had major roles in films like Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown is a 1987 action thriller, and the third sequel to the 1974 film, Death Wish, once again starring Charles Bronson....
, Psycho II, and After Dark, My Sweet
After Dark, My Sweet
After Dark, My Sweet is a neo-noir film directed by James Foley starring Jason Patric, Bruce Dern, and Rachel Ward. It is based on the 1955 Jim Thompson novel of the same name.-Plot:...
. Dickerson also guest starred on episodes of shows like Three's Company
Three's Company
Three's Company is an American sitcom that aired from March 15, 1977, to September 18, 1984, on ABC. It is based on the British sitcom, Man About the House....
, Charlie's Angels
Charlie's Angels
Charlie's Angels is a television series about three women who work for a private investigation agency, and is one of the first shows to showcase women in roles traditionally reserved for men...
, Little House On The Prairie
Little House on the Prairie (TV series)
Little House on the Prairie is an American Western drama television series, starring Michael Landon and Melissa Gilbert, about a family living on a farm in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, in the 1870s and 1880s. The show was an adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder's best-selling series of Little House books...
, L.A. Law
L.A. Law
L.A. Law is a US television legal drama that ran on NBC from September 15, 1986 to May 19, 1994. L.A. Law reflected the social and cultural ideologies of the 1980s and early 1990s and many of the cases featured on the show dealt with hot topic issues such as abortion, racism, gay rights,...
, and Sledge Hammer.
Dickerson is a member of SAG
Screen Actors Guild
The Screen Actors Guild is an American labor union representing over 200,000 film and television principal performers and background performers worldwide...
, AFTRA, Actors' Equity, the Dramatists' Guild, the Author's Guild, the Academy of American Poets
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is a non-profit organization dedicated to the art of poetry. The Academy was incorporated as a "membership corporation" in New York State in 1934...
, and AMPAS.