George Garrett

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George Garrett (1929-2008). Courtesy Blackbird.

George Palmer Garrett (June 11, 1929 – May 25, 2008) was an American poet, novelist, and academic.

Life

Overview

Garrett worked as a book reviewer and screenwriter, and taught at the University of Cambridge and, for many years, at the University of Virginia. He is the subject of critical books by R.H.W. Dillard, Casey Clabough, and Irving Malin.

Life

Garrett was born in Orlando Florida on June 11, 1929. He attended The Hill School. He graduated from the Sewanee Military Academy in Sewanee Tennessee, in 1945. He earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 1952, having matriculated in 1947 and having attended Columbia University in 1948-49. He also earned an M.A. in 1956 and a Ph.D. in 1985, both also from Princeton.

Garrett served in the US Army in 1946–1947, and was stationed in Leonding, Austria.

Career

Garrett began his teaching career as an assistant professor at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut (1957–60). After a year as a visiting lecturer at Rice University, he became associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, where he taught for 5 years before accepting a post as professor of English at Hollins College, Virginia, in 1967. In 1964-1965 he was writer-in-residence at Princeton University.

In 1971, he became professor of English and writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, where he taught until 1973. From 1974 to 1977 he was senior fellow at the Council of the Humanities, Princeton University. He was then a year at Columbia University as adjunct professor (1977–78), a semester as writer-in-residence at Bennington College, Vermont, a semester at the Virginia Military Institute, and several years at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979–84).

In 1984 Garrett was appointed Henry Hoyns Professor of English at the University of Virginia, the position in which he continued until his retirement in December 1999.

Garrett's service to the arts was substantial. He served a 2-year term as president of the Associated Writing Programs (1971–73). A charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he was the organization's vice-chancellor (1987–93) and chancellor (1993–97). Over the years, he edited several magazines and book series. He was Contemporary Poetry Series editor at the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1962–68; and Short Story Series editor at the Louisiana State University Press, 1966-69. From 1958 to 1971 he was United States poetry editor for Transatlantic Review and, from 1965 to 1971 co-editor of Hollins Critic. He was a contributing editor for Contempora and assistant editor of The Film Journal. With Brendan Galvin he edited Poultry: A Magazine of Voice; and he was fiction editor at The Texas Review.

Garrett was unparalleled in his generous treatment of other writers. Dozens of younger writers, both students of his, and others with whom he came in contact, were helped at crucial points in their careers by Garrett, who until the last days of his life was interested in furthering the work of younger colleagues, and of people whose work he had been championing for decades. He was a widely beloved and even revered figure, a man about whom the poet R.H.W. Dillard said, that when he once took someone's hand in friendship, he never let go.

Garrett died at home in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the age of 78 of cancer. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2006 after having suffered with Myasthenia Gravis for some years.

Writing

Garrett is well known for his Elizabethan Trilogy, composed of Death of the Fox, The Succession, and Entered from the Sun: a body of work that is so imbued with its subject matter and time as to create the sense that he lived through it all, and had total recall of life in the respective courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I. Death of the Fox, the first of the books, raises questions about the nature of the form itself, and in fact all of Mr. Garrett's writing challenges the accepted ideas about the various forms in which he chose to work. The vast panorama of fictional and historical people that occupy the stage in the three novels is equaled by the beautifully drawn contemporary cast of characters in his other novels, The Finished Man, Double Vision, DO LORD, REMEMBER ME; WHICH ONES ARE THE ENEMY; and THE KING OF BABYLON SHALL NOT COME AGAINST YOU. Garrett never repeated himself, and the variety of his output has perhaps been a bit daunting to the critical establishment of his time, American critics tending to prefer their subjects to be rather one-noted, consistent and readily classified as to type, or theme, or treatment.

Recognition

Garrett was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2002 to 2006.

Awards

• Sewanee Review fellowship (1958)
• American Academy in Rome fellowship (1958)
• Ford grant, for drama (1960)
• National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967)
• Contempora award (1971)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1974)
• American Academy award (1985)
• New York Public Library Literary Lion award (1988)
• T.S. Eliot Award (1989)
• PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction (1990)
• Aiken-Taylor Award (1999)
• Lifetime Achievement Award from the Library of Virginia (2004)
• Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers (2005)
• Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize (2006)

Publications

Poetry

• The Reverend Ghost: Poems. New York: Scribner, 1957.
• The Sleeping Gypsy, and other poems. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1958.
• Abraham's Knife, and other poems. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.
• For a Bitter Season: New and selected poems. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1967.
• Welcome to the Medicine Show: Postcards, flashcards, snapshots (1978)
• Luck's Shining Child: A Miscellany of poems and verses (1981)
• The Collected Poems of George Garrett. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1984.
• Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments: New and old poems, 1957-1997. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
• The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected poems, 1964-1999. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

Plays

• Garden Spot, U.S.A. (first produced by Alley Theatre, Houston, TX, 1962).
• Enchanted Ground: A play for readers' theatre. York, ME: Old Gaol Museum Press, 1981.

Novels

• The Finished Man. New York: Scribner, 1959.
• Which Ones Are the Enemy?. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961.
• Do, Lord, Remember Me. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965.
• Poison Pen; or, Live now, pay later (illustrated by Jonathan Bumas). Winston-Salem, NC: Stuart Wright, 1986.
• The Old Army Game: A novel and stories. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994.
• The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
• Double Vision: A novel. Tuscaloosa, AB: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

Elizabethan trilogy

• Death of the Fox. Garden City, NY: Doublday, 1971.
• The Succession: A novel of Elizabeth and James. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983.
• Entered from the Sun. New York: Doubleday, 1990.

Short fiction

• King of the Mountain. New York: Scribner, 1957.
• In the Briar Patch: A book of stories. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1961.
• Cold Ground Was My Bed Last Night. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1964.
• A Wreath for Garibaldi, and other stories. London: Hart-Davis, 1969.
• The Magic Striptease. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.
• To Recollect a Cloud of Ghosts: Christmas in England (1979)
• An Evening Performance: New and selected short stories (1985)
• Whistling in the Dark: True stories, and other fables. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
• Empty Bed Blues. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Non-fiction

• James Jones. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
• Understanding Mary Lee Settle. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
• My Silk Purse and Yours: The publishing scene and American literary art. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992.
• The Sorrows of Fat City: A selection of literary essays and reviews. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1992.
• Southern Excursions: Views on southern letters in my time(edited by James McKinley). Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

Juvenile

• Sir Slob and the Princess: A play for children. New York: Samuel French, 1962.

Collected editions

• Bad Man Blues: A portable George Garrett. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1998.
• Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a writing life (edited by Jeb Livingood). Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2002.
• The Collected George Garrett (edited by Michael Murphy). Nottingham, UK: Trent Editions, 2009.

Edited

• New Writing from Virginia (afterword by Richard Wilbur). Charlottesville, VA: New Writing Associates, 1963.
• The Girl in the Black Raincoat: Variations on a theme. New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pierce, 1966.
• Botteghe Oscure reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974.
• The Liar's Craft (edited with Stephen Kendrick). Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1977.
• That's What I Like (About the South), and other new southern stories for the nineties (edited with Paul Ruffin). Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

Preceded by Grace Simpson

Poet Laureate of Virginia 2002–2004

Succeeded by Rita Dove

References

Fonds

George Garrett's papers are housed in the Duke University Special Collections Library.

External links

Poems

• Three poems by George Garrett
• George Garrett 1929-2008 at the Poetry Foundation.
• George Garrett at Adilegian (11 poems)

Prose

• "Empty Bed Blues," Blackbird Spring 2002, Volume 1, Number 1
• "Thanksgiving," Blackbird Spring 2008, Volume 7, Number 1.

Audio / video

• An interview with George Garrett at Blackbird

Books

• George P. Garrett at Amazon.com

About

• Garrett, George (Palmer) at eNotes
• George Garrett at Blackbird
• "George Garrett, southern novelist, is dead," New York Times
• "George Garrett: An Appreciation," by R.H.W. Dillard, Virginia Quarterly Review.
• "Farewell, George Garrett" at The Hook.