George Garrett (poet)
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George Garrett | |
---|---|
Born | Orlando, Florida, U.S. | June 11, 1929
Died | May 25, 2008 Charlottesville, Virginia, U.S. | (aged 78)
Occupation | Poet, writer |
Education | The Hill School Sewanee Military Academy Princeton University (BA, MA, PhD) Columbia University |
Genre | Poetry, theatre, fiction |
Notable works | Death of the Fox |
George Palmer Garrett (June 11, 1929 – May 25, 2008) was an American poet and novelist.
Biography
George Palmer 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 BA from Princeton University in 1952, having matriculated in 1947 and having attended Columbia University in 1948–49. He also received his MA (1956) and PhD (1985) from Princeton.
Garrett served in the US Army (1946–47), and was stationed in Europe, in Leonding, Austria.
He began his teaching career as an assistant professor at
Garrett served a two-year term as president of the
He is known for his Elizabethan trilogy, 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 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 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 political novel The Finished Man; 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. [citation needed]
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 from myasthenia gravis for some years.[4]
George Garrett's papers are housed in the Duke University Special Collections Library.
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)
- Thomas Wolfe Award (2006)
Bibliography
- Novels
- The Finished Man (1960)
- Which Ones Are the Enemy? (1962)
- Do, Lord, Remember Me (1965)
- Death of the Fox (1971)
- The Succession: A Novel of Elizabeth and James (1983)
- Poison Pen (1986)
- Entered from the Sun (1990)
- The Old Army Game: A Novel and Stories (1994)
- The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You (1996)
- The Elizabethan Trilogy (Death of the Fox, Entered from the Sun, and Succession) (1998)
- Double Vision (2004)
- Short-story collections
- King of the Mountain (1958)
- In the Briar Patch (1961)
- Cold Ground Was My Bed Last Night (1964)
- A Wreath for Garibaldi and Other Stories (1969)
- The Magic Striptease (1973)
- To Recollect a Cloud of Ghosts: Christmas in England (1979)
- An Evening Performance: New and Selected Short Stories (1985)
- Empty Bed Blues (2006)
- Plays
- Sir Slob and the Princess: A Play for Children (1962)
- Garden Spot, U.S.A. (1962)
- Enchanted Ground (1981)
- Poetry collections
- The Reverend Ghost (1957)
- The Sleeping Gypsy and Other Poems (1958)
- Abraham's Knife and Other Poems (1961)
- For a Bitter Season: New and Selected Poems (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 (1984)
- Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments: New and Old Poems, 1957–1997 (1998)
- Other writings
- James Jones (biography) (1984)
- Understanding Mary Lee Settle (1988)
- My Silk Purse and Yours: The Publishing Scene and American Literary Art (1992)
- The Sorrows of Fat City: A Selection of Literary Essays and Reviews (1992)
- Whistling in the Dark: True Stories and Other Fables (1992)
- Bad Man Blues: A Portable George Garrett (1998)
- Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life (2002)
- Southern Excursions: Views on Southern Letters in My Time (2003)
- Other publications
References
- ISBN 9780938626800.
- ISBN 9781455602094.
- ^ "Virginia Poets Laureate". Library of Congress Main Reading Room. Retrieved October 3, 2014.
- ^ Fox, Margalit (May 20, 2008). "George Garrett, 78, Southern Novelist, Is Dead". The New York Times. Retrieved June 8, 2010.
- ^ Blackbird Spring 2008, Volume 7, Number 1 online journal of Virginia Commonwealth University fiction Thanksgiving
- JSTOR 26438775.