Long Fiction:
The Finished Man, 1959
Which Ones Are the Enemy?, 1961
Do, Lord, Remember Me, 1965
Death of the Fox, 1971
The Magic Striptease, 1973
The Succession, 1983
Poison Pen, 1986
Entered from the Sun, 1990
The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You, 1996
Short Fiction:
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
An Evening Performance: New and Selected Stories, 1985
The Old Army Game: A Novel and Stories, 1994
Drama:
Sir Slob and the Princess: A Play for Children, pb. 1962
Garden Spot, U.S.A., pr. 1962
Enchanted Ground, pb. 1981
Screenplays:
The Young Lovers, 1964
The Playground, 1965
Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, 1966 (with R. H. W. Dillard and John Rodenbeck)
Poetry:
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, 1981
The Collected Poems of George Garrett, 1984
Days of Our Lives Lie in Fragments: New and Old Poems, 1957-1997, 1998
Nonfiction:
James Jones, 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
Going to See the Elephant: Pieces of a Writing Life, 2002 (Jeb Livingood, editor)
Southern Excursions: Views on Southern Letters in My Time, 2003 (James Conrad McKinley, editor)
Edited Texts:
New Writing from Virginia, 1963
The Girl in the Black Raincoat, 1966
Man and the Movies, 1967 (with W. R. Robinson)
New Writing in South Carolina, 1971 (with William Peden)
The Sounder Few: Essays from “The Hollins Critic,” 1971 (with R. H. W. Dillard and John Moore)
Film Scripts One, Two, Three, and Four, 1971-1972 (with O. B. Hardison, Jr., and Jane Gelfman)
Craft So Hard to Learn, 1972 (with John Graham)
The Writer’s Voice, 1973 (with Graham)
Intro 5, 1974 (with Walton Beacham)
The Botteghe Oscure Reader, 1974 (with Katherine Garrison Biddle)
Intro 6: Life As We Know It, 1974
Intro 7: All of Us and None of You, 1975
Intro 8: The Liar’s Craft, 1977
Intro 9: Close to Home, 1979 (with Michael Mewshaw)
Elvis in Oz: New Stories and Poems from the Hollins Creative Writing Program, 1992 (with Mary Flinn)
The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road: Twenty-three Variations on a Theme, 1992 (with Susan Stamberg)
That’s What I Like (About the South), and Other New Southern Stories for the Nineties, 1993 (with Paul Ruffin)
The Yellow Shoe Poets: Selected Poems, 1964-1999, 1999
Miscellaneous:
Whistling in the Dark: True Stories and Other Fables, 1992
Bad Man Blues: A Portable George Garrett, 1998
George Palmer Garrett, Jr., is known principally as a novelist and poet, but he also achieved recognition as playwright, screenwriter, reviewer, and literary critic. He was educated at Sewanee Military Academy and the Hill School. He entered Princeton University in 1947, receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees, and in 1985 he received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton. Garrett has had a distinguished career as teacher and scholar at Wesleyan University, Hollins College, the University of South Carolina, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia.
Garrett is best known for the historical novels Death of the Fox, which tells of the last days of Sir Walter Raleigh; The Succession, which chronicles the lives and times of Elizabeth I and her successor, James I; and Entered from the Sun, in which two bit players on the political scene–one a soldier, the other an actor–attempt to unravel the complicated death of Christopher Marlowe. Garrett’s knowledge of the Elizabethan period is encyclopedic, and his special interest is in the psychology and politics of the Elizabethans. The trilogy delves into the complex machinations of political power and influence in Elizabethan England as these affect both the wealthy and powerful and the common people. The result is a political, social, and psychological profile of one of the most glorious and violent ages of Western civilization.
In his other novels and in his short stories Garrett uses contemporary American life as his subject. His early fiction is realistic and traditional, while his later fiction tends toward the experimental, often relying on surreal characters and episodes, as in his novel Poison Pen. At the center of all his fiction, both early and later, is a gentle war between Garrett’s implacable Episcopalianism and his puckish comic sense. Garrett has also compiled volumes of critical essays that reflect both wide reading and levelheaded judgment, edited collections of stories, and issued collections of his vintage fiction. (The Old Army Game collects his best writing about the military, including his novel Which Ones Are the Enemy?)
Garrett’s poetry falls into two broad categories: personal lyric poems and topical, playful, satiric poems. Many of Garrett’s lyric poems deal with the themes of childhood, growing up, and aging. These poems are invariably terse and insightful, frequently using stories from the Bible as sources. They tell of the pains and joys of the human cycles of birth, growth, and death. Garrett’s satiric poems gain inspiration from the satires and conceits of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans. As these poets saw in their ages, Garrett sees in postwar America a way of life in need of exploration and definition. His satiric poetry often has a sharp edge, but it is neither bitter nor pessimistic.
Although the major concerns of Garrett’s poetry were constant, he experimented with poetic forms and themes. The language of his poetry was increasingly colloquial, and his subject matter ranged from the classical to the topical. The first thing that many readers notice about his poetry is its clever and incisive treatment of contemporary events and people. His poems about actors Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson and Cosmopolitan magazine are attractive because of their subjects and their playful insights, but balanced against these transitory treatments is a deep and complicated understanding of the human condition.