Daily Inspiration Quote by James Dickey

Calling William Packard “surely” one of the great editors of “our time” is praise with a built-in defense mechanism. Dickey isn’t just complimenting a colleague; he’s staking reputational capital in a world where literary prestige is rationed and often policed. “Surely” reads like a small preemptive strike against the doubters: the academics who measure greatness by institutional pedigree, the gatekeepers who confuse visibility with value, the rival camps that treat editing as clerical labor rather than artistic midwifery.

The line also elevates editing from backstage work to cultural authorship. In American letters, editors are the hidden infrastructure of taste, deciding which voices get shaped, sustained, and circulated. By framing Packard as “one of the great,” Dickey collapses the hierarchy that places the novelist (signature on the cover) above the editor (name in small type). The subtext is gratitude, but also politics: Packard becomes a proxy for a more plural, risk-tolerant literary ecosystem, where the editor’s sensibility can matter as much as the writer’s ego.

Context matters because Dickey’s career sat at the crossroads of high literary seriousness and broader public attention. For a novelist to deliver such an unadorned accolade suggests Packard’s influence wasn’t merely technical; it was curatorial, a long-term commitment to work that needed an advocate. The sentence is blunt because it’s meant to travel: a portable seal of approval, a credential handed from one recognized name to another whose labor usually goes uncelebrated.